The USA in the Time of Andrew Johnson
1865-1869
By Mike Donovan
Tennessee Governor The Grouchiest President
Mr. Greenville – Mr. Stubborn - No VP – Reconstruction – “Tennessee Johnson” - Third President to be born in North Carolina and elected from Tennessee – Only President to serve in the US Senate after leaving the White House – Maxico (Maximillian in Mexico) – Purchased Alaska – First of two Presidents to be impeached and acquitted – Once owned eight slaves – Problems with alcohol – His son Charles died in 1863 fighting for the Union
The time of Andrew Johnson is the time of Reconstruction. More to the point, it was the time of the failure of Reconstruction. Until about 1960 the failure of Reconstruction was blamed primarily on Northern radical extremism, as if that created a reaction from the South that wouldn't have been there otherwise, as if the South would have co-operated with the North if only north hadn't behaved with such “bitterness.” That word, “bitter” is the ultimate weasel-word for the history of the tragic era. 96% of the time it is invoked only against men like Sumner and Stevens, as though the Southern whites and their leaders couldn't match these men bitter for bitter.
Reconstruction failed in the South mainly because racism was too deeply implanted in the dark dungeons of the white, and especially the Southern white mind. The South could accept losing the war, just barely, and with great bitterness could live under temporary Northern white administration and rule. But it could never reconcile itself to taking orders from n-words. The phrase was usually about refusing to accept “Negro and Carpetbagger rule,” but out of 100 points of bitter, the Negro part was worth 93 points and the carpetbagger part was worth 7.
Another huge reason for the failure of post-war reconstruction was the essential nature of Americans both North and South. The very concept of the nation was personal independence. Americans lived under a government of sorts but rarely if ever had to bow to its will. The United States governed, but it did not rule. Now the North was going to have to impose genuine rule over the South and that idea was never in the American mind-set from the time the first ship landed at Jamestown in 1609.
The Japanese in the all of 1945 stunned the American occupation forces by their complete co-operation. Mass resistance would have been easy enough. Not only did the Japanese accept American rule passively, they accepted it actively. The Yanks could not believe that the same people who had beheaded US prisoners while Japanese officers looking on smiled and laughed were now putting up welcome mats for the occupiers all over Tokyo, sometimes quite literally. Everywhere the Americans went the Japanese greeted them with warmth and encouragement for a better tomorrow for all. The Americans were befuddled by such turning on a dime.
But it makes sense, and it explains why the situation in the South was so hopeless. The Japanese people had been accustomed to obedience under strong authority. It was part of their culture, part of their history. They had bowed before shoguns, bowed before the emperor, bowed before the shrines of their ancestors. They were a bowing people.
The Southerners were wild mustangs who had been corralled into a holding pen after Appomattox and the North expected them to calm down now and behave. These wild horses were essentially just chomping at the bit to be free again. Just let your guard down one time, let that a lock fall off one corner of one fence and we're out of here willy nilly and all that fighting looks like it didn't accomplish much after all.
America was unique that way and was in a uniquely impossible situation therefore. The rest of the world had seen brutal wars in which the conquered got much better terms out of the conquerers by acting out submissive gestures of surrender, bringing closure to both sides. Both sides knew instinctively that this was wise. Bitterness in style or substance on the part of the defeated was the work of fools, and everyone knew and abided by these rules. That was just the way of the world.
But the United States was a new world with a new set of rules. This new globally unprecedented human being, created by defiance and independence of spirit, accepting government only reluctantly and feeling free to change it when it, not them, misbehaved, made closure impossible. The South was not willing to act out any rituals of submission to satisfy the closure needs of both sides. It accepted defeat only after it ran out of bullets. Lots of luck getting a 'we are not worthy' kow-tow out of these folk.
If the South had won the war, the same nightmare would have faced the South trying to impose Reconstruction on the wild mustangs of the North. To a large degree, it was the nature of Americans, not the nature of Southerners, that made a reconciliatory Reconstruction impossible.
I do not agree with the main point the historians usually make about President Johnson. They say that if only Lincoln had lived, the tragedy of Reconstruction could have been avoided. Johnson was harsh on the South whereas Lincoln would have been the great conciliator.
But think about it. The South hated Lincoln. Johnson was a Southerner. Just because Lincoln had warmth and compassion and a sense of forgiveness towards the South, didn't mean that the feeling was mutual. Everything Lincoln proposed would have been resisted in the South because this was the guy they hated during the Civil War, and the guy they hated before the war. In the Southern mind Abraham was the man who caused the war, the man whose election in 1860 caused all the secessions in the first place, and you're telling me as a student that without any doubt, the post-war era would have been much better and much easier if only Lincoln had lived.
I say that Booth was not an isolated freak. Johnny Wilkes represented the mood, heart, and intellect of the South at that time. He spoke for the South and did for the South what had to be done. Booth beat 10,000 other assassins who were taking numbers for the right to take a shot at Lincoln for the Confederacy. Lincoln wouldn't have lived much longer past April of 1865 if JW Booth had never been born.
I speak especially of the civilians. Respect for the terms of surrender was better among former Confederate soldiers than it was among former Confederate civilians. Soldiers have a deep respect for each other. There's no hawk like a chickenhawk. Booth was a civilian. He had served in the Maryland militia, but had never enlisted in the Confederate Army.
Lincoln had presided over the South's destruction. He had made the decision that secession would not stand. Was the South really about to embrace Lincoln’s reconstruction plans? History thinks so but I doubt it.
The South didn’t embrace Lincoln’s gentle heart until it stopped beating. And
AJ was a Southerner. He wasn’t exactly a defeated Confederate’s nightmare come true.
I feel sorry for Andy Johnson. He is not considered to be anything close to one of our great presidents. Yet he had to steer the country through the most delicate, and perhaps the most difficult time in all of our history. How anyone could have pleased history in his position is a difficult question. I doubt that FDR or George Washington could have done a whole lot better in 1866.
Johnson is usually recalled as an intemperate, stubborn, poorly educated, vindictive, indiscriminating racist. And those were his good points. He fought a three-year battle with the Radicals over Presidential versus Congressional Reconstruction, and the limits of the Presidency, and fought personal battles with hecklers and the bottle.
It should also be recalled that Andrew had won the respect and admiration of Abraham Lincoln, the North and all decent opponents of slavery when he was the only US Senator from the South who refused to secede from the Union and the Congress. This is the profile in courage that led him by accident to the highest office in the country.
If Lincoln had never been shot and Johnson had quietly lived out his term as Vice President he would have gone down in American history as a hero of the first magnitude. His stance in 1861 would be cited gloriously every time his name is mentioned. Instead he is one of the dogs of American history.
American history seems contradictory on Andy. It tells us that Johnson represented harsh terms for the prostrate South, a horrible downgrade from Lincoln's compassion. If Andy was so harsh on the South, why did the Radical Republicans impeach him because he wasn't harsh enough on the South? So which is it? Was AJ too lenient? Or was he too harsh? Why was Johnson's entire presidency punctuated by an endless battle with the Radicals over their charges that he was too lenient with the secessionist states? He was too lenient for the Rads and too harsh for the Rebs and so both sides ganged up on him then and history piled on.
The 1868 impeachment of Johnson was ostensibly inspired by the removal of one of his cabinet members, Mr. Ed Stanton. The true motive for impeaching Johnson was general partisan dissatisfaction with his excessive use of Presidential power in the field of Reconstruction. If he had been charged on these more general terms, he might have lost in the Senate court and been removed from office, but since the specific charges against him were very weak, the man from Tennessee was acquitted in the Senate (as was Clinton 131 years later).
BIO: He was named either after his uncle or Andrew Jackson. Andrew Johnson was born on December 29, 1808 in Raleigh, North Carolina. His father Jacob ‘Big Jake’ Johnson died when he was three. As a boy Andrew became an apprentice to a tailor. Johnson ran away to another state when he got caught playing a prank on someone. He wanted to avoid punishment. The family migrated west to Tennessee with the leadership of a blind donkey (no joke).
Johnson was the poorest of the poor Presidents. Many historians believe that the scars of poverty left in him a lifetime obsession with hating the rich, especially the Southern planter aristocracy. They feel that many of his key political actions as president were shaped by this personal socio-psychological affliction. I’m hesitant to agree or disagree with this. (After reading several ridiculous books and articles on some recent presidents, I have to take all psycho-politics with caution. Who knows how certain orthodoxies take shape in historical science? But once they do they stick like glue. ‘History is fables agreed upon.’ This is many more times true in the analytical side of it than the factual. You can disprove the factual myths with good research, but subjective conclusions are harder to debunk. They start off as liquid cement, with room for argument but once they solidify, good luck trying to change them.) If Johnson hated the aristocracy so much, how come he never supported having their estates seized and divided as the Radicals had wished?
On 5.17.27 he married Eliza McCardle who taught the dropout how to write. Contrary to what is often written, Johnson had already taught himself how to read. In the movie “Tennessee Johnson” Andy can't even speak a discernable sentence, let alone read or write one, and she is a genius librarian, more articulate than a Harvard English professor. The dialogue in these scenes is sickening patronizing exaggeration.
Johnson was 19 and Eliza was only 17. The marriage was a happy one although Eliza was ill for much of Johnson’s tenure in the White House and rarely played hostess. (Someone should write a book about the illnesses of the First Ladies in the 19th Century.) The J’s had five children.
In 1835 Johnson was elected to the Tennessee State Legislature, then graduated to Congressman, Governor and Senator from Tennessee. When the Civil War broke out he was the only Southern senator to choose to remain in Congress. Lincoln did not forget this loyalty and Johnson would be useful to the President in 64. Although he was both a Southerner and a lifelong Democrat, Johnson was willing to change over to the so-called Constitutional Union Party to become the Vice President.
Senator Johnson got along well with the Radical Republicans during the war and served as military governor of Tennessee from 1862 to 1864. In this capacity he was a strong supporter of the emancipation of the slaves and even claimed he ‘would be their Moses.’ Johnson himself had once owned eight slaves. Some holy Moses.
There is little to suggest that Johnson was pining for the Vice Presidency when Lincoln chose him in 1864.
Lincoln had a good personal relationship with Johnson when the latter served in the Senate. He respected Johnson’s well-known oratorical skills, and loved him for staying loyal to the Union when the rest of the low (lower) South seceded. His choice of Johnson for VP in 64 was expedient of course. But Johnson had also earned the job through his personality and deeds. He is still called one of our ‘accidental presidents’ but this is unfair. His courageous stance in the name of the Union and the course he steered from 1860 to 1865 was not accidental.
Johnson’s cabinet;
Secretary of State-------------------William H. Seward—1865-1869
Secretary of War--------------------Edwin M. Stanton—1865-1867
Ulysses S. Grant-----1867-1868
Lorenzo Thomas-----1868
J. M. Schofield-------1868-1869
Secretary of Treasury------------Hugh McCulloch-----1865-1869
Att. General-----------------------James Speed----------1865-1866
Henry Stanbery-------1866-1868
W.M. Evarts-----------1868-1869
Secretary of Navy---------------Gideon Welles--------1865-1869
Welles is the only Lincoln-Johnson cabinet survivor. He made it from the beginning to the end of the two full terms 1861-1869.
Johnson was a great orator. But he also had a little bit of a drinking problem and was known to respond to hecklers with inappropriate language. These incidents were later cited as part of an article for his impeachment.
EVENTS;
WINDING DOWN THE WAR
RECONSTRUCTION
SULTANA APRIL 1865
DAVIS CAPTURED
CIVIL RIGHTS AMENDMENT
1865 RACIAL MASSACRES AT NEW ORLEANS AND MEMPHIS
THE BLACK CODES
BLOODY SHIRT
CIVIL RIGHTS ACT APRIL 9 1866
CONGRESSIONAL ELECTIONS OF 1866
PURCHASE OF ALASKA 1867
TENURE OF OFFICE ACT
END OF MAXIMILLIAN IN MEXICO
RISE OF KU KLUX KLAN
RED CLOUD’S WAR
IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 1868
READMISSION OF TN AR AL FL LS 1866, 1868
GONE WITH THE WIND
INAUGURATION;
Andrew Johnson took the oath of office from Justice Sanborn in his room at the Kirkwood Hotel in Washington on the morning of April 15, 1865.
Was Andrew Johnson drunk when he later gave his first address as President to Congress? It is said so. Johnson had in his short term of one month as Vice President already given several famously fubar speeches (‘fubar’ is drinkers acronym that stands for ‘fouled up beyond all recognition.’)
There has long been a standard apologist version that explained that AJ was only inebriated that one time for medicinal reasons, but a recent biographer says that his drinking was well known in Washington well before the Inaugural.
CHASING BOOTH
For most of the first two weeks of Johnson's administration, the business of Lincoln's murder was still unfinished. John Wilkes Booth was still on the run.
Booth was only 26 when he shot the President, thinking that he was doing something noble. In his diary on the run he wrote that, “Though we hated to kill, our country owed all its troubles to him, and God merely made me the instrument of his punishment. I will never repent.”
On April 25 Booth was cornered by the federal posse in a barn in Port Royal, the site of a famous battle in the latter stages of the war. He was trapped in there with Herold, like two bank robbers in a 1930's gangster movie. The feds had everything for the scene but the bullhorn and the searchlights.
“All right Boothsie! Come on out with your hands up!”
“Come and get me coppers!” Blam blam.
Herold decided to give up and come out with his hands up to be hanged later. Booth decided it was better to go down fighting. Always the drama queen. The authorities set the barn on fire. Booth had no choice but to emerge from the smoke. Before he had a chance to give up and say, “Uncle Sam”
a man named Boston Corbett took aim and shot Booth in the chest at the thresh-hold.
The barn was blazing now and they had to drag the wounded Booth away from the danger so they could hang him later, unless he died right there.
It was fairly clear that Booth was not going to survive. He asked for water. One guy said, “You want water, I'll give you some water” but before he could give something vile to Booth, a more Christian-like man said, “No. He is going to die. Let's not bring ourselves down to his level.” The good samaritan gave Booth a big drink of ice cold water. Booth looked up from his stretcher with moments left to live and said, “Tell mother I died fighting for my country.” What a delusional drip. The he said, “I thought I was doing the right thing, ... Its all useless.” Then he died.
This last comment, that he thought he did the right thing, clearly shows that JW realized on his death stretcher that he basically had messed up. His initial diary entries after he first fled Ford's show that he was resolutely sure he had done the right thing. But in those 11 days between April 14 and 25 he had read a few newspapers and that even his own South was now mourning Lincoln and condemning him. 'Those ungrateful Rebels. They call Lincoln every foul name in the book, an when I go and shoot him on behalf of all of us they start calling me the bad guy? Life isn't fair.'
Booth's diary also revealed that he had said something to Lincoln as he shot him. The story of him landing on the stage and shouting Sic Semper Tyrannusaurus!” has been told ad nauseam. But rarely is it put into the story that Booth shouted “Sic semper!” as he pulled the trigger. I think it's odd that historians never take Booth at his word and include that in describing the attack. I see absolutely no reason to think Booth would have any motive to embellish the story or completely make that up. It could well be that no one else in the booth confirmed Booth because of the noise of the laughter in the play (Booth pulled the trigger amidst a great audience laugh,) the gunshot and the chaotic screaming trauma that followed in an instant. What he said or whether he said it got lost in the sauce. But if we're going to make his shouted sentence from the stage so important to the story, we should also include his pathetic utterance as he pulled the trigger and brought untold ruin on the South.
MOPPING UP OPERATIONS 1865
Not all Southern military units had surrendered with Bobby Lee at Appomattox, and there were pursuits and skirmishes yet to be fought before all of the Rebel Army was quiet and behaved. Jefferson Davis was on the lam.
Lincoln’s assassins were still on the run also.
Johnson’s Secretary of State was hovering between life and death after being stabbed several times in his home by one of the conspirators.
John Wilkes Booth was trapped in a fiery barn with a conspirator named Herold. Mr. Herold came out and surrendered, so he could be hanged later, but Booth would not give up. He was shot in the neck by a guy named Boston and did not survive the evening. Jack Booth's resistance spared the nation the spectacle of him harangue the courts on the justice of his and the Southern cause. Thank you John Wilkes Booth, for not surrendering.
Jeff Davis was finally cornered on the night of May 9. In spite of the pleas of his military commanders, Davis had refused to surrender the Confederate government, scurrying about the south with a party of up to 2,000 officials with their administrative accoutrements. By the morning of the tenth it was just Jeff and a handful of die-hards. Davis was captured, arrested and returned in chains to Washington.
JD spent the next two years in the Federal prison at Fortress Monroe and by all accounts was not treated well. He spent most of these months in leg irons and was denied visitors. Many of his former enemies now petitioned for his release or at least for more humane prison conditions. After all, he was now suffering one one-hundredth of the pains of a typical slave under his old Confederacy. Something had to be done! After 2 years the bail was raised and Davis was released.
The Lincoln conspirators were not as lucky. Four were hanged including a woman, Mary Surotte who had let her home be used to plan the attacks, but who had not actually taken any direct action herself. The famous photo of the four of them with her poignant hanging skirt is not one I like to look at but am exposed to regularly in my studies.
As for Seward, he recovered from his nearly fatal assassination attempt and went on to become a most able Secretary of State. Seward showed Christian forgiveness. With every right to feel even more vengeful towards the South after nearly being nearly slain by one of their own, he instead worked hard to soften the hard-line positions of Johnson.
PALMITO RANCH
The war wasn't over in Texas overtly, and it wasn't over in Missouri covertly.
In Texas a major battle was fought between US Troops and Rebel troops at a place called Palmito Ranch on May 12. This was two full months after Lee surrendered at Appomattox. The fighting went back and forth and the Confederates won.
These Rebs were fighting for a CSA that no longer existed.
There were more than a hundred wounded on both sides and one KIA. A Federal private named John Williams was the last man to die in combat (at least officially) in the Civil War. Poor bastard.
Guerilla fighting was a big problem in Missouri for most of the summer of 65. President Johnson had a particular problem dealing with the MS county that bears his name.
SULTANA
People think of maritime disaster and they think of the Titanic, the Lusitania, or the Empress of Ireland. But the tragedy of the Sultana tops them all.
Sultana was a Mississippi River transport built in 1863 by Rev. John Lashua in Cincinnati. It was plenty big enough, as river transports go, and a lovely looking Mart Twain motif steamer. But it was not built to carry 2,400 Union troops back north which is what it was doing on that fateful April 27 1865.
Sultana was built to transport 500 people on a good day. But the war was over and the Washington Senators were getting a lot of letters to get our boys home as soon as possible. There was no time to lose so the Sultana was packed to the hilt with victorious Yankee soldiers, and a minority of civilians mixed in.
The ship (is it too small to be called a ship?) or the boat, was chugging happily north near Helena Arkansas when the boiler room blew sky high.
Suffering Sultana April 27 1865
A fire broke out on Sultana and it spread faster than the MGM. The Sultana went down fast.
The 4.25 death toll equalled one of the top ten worst battles of the Civil War. 1,776 people perished in the Sultana disaster. Many died in the cold water from hypothermia or drowned. Some burned to death, others went down with the ship. Bodies were being found downriver for months. Sultana was the worst maritime disaster in the USA story. It makes the Edmund Fitzgerald look like chump change.
DAVIS CAPTURED
On May 10 1865 the jig was up for “President” Jefferson Davis. Federal troops cornered him at last in Irwinville Georgia where he was hiding out disguised as a woman. He had an entourage with him that included Texan Jack Reagan the former Postmaster General who had recently taken over as Secretary of something else when someone else got sick and had to resign.
Appomattox had only surrendered the ANV to the Union, it had not surrendered the CSA. There was really no one great moment when the Confederacy disappeared. It all happened in stages, and the capture of Davis at Irwinville was certainly a key marker along the way.
The flight of Davis was a nearly month long affair as he meandered his way south with the USA troops (why do they always have be only called “Union” or “Federal?”) on his slavery-loving heels.
The last hope for Davis was to flee across the Mississippi and join up with the wild and unrepentant Rebs in Texas and Missouri. Together they might carry on the fight from the west. But JD getting from the Piedmont plateau to the plains of Texas was just plain impossible.
RACE RIOTS
The race problem action began quickly for the Johnson era. On April 30 1865, a 3-day race riot erupted in the city of Memphis. It would be more accurate to call it a race massacre. It started with some scuffling between black Army troops and local police. Then white mobs joined the police in an indiscriminate attack on every black person they could find. Forty-six people were killed, all of them black, some of them women and children. Eighty were seriously injured. On the other side, one white person was injured. Four black churches and 12 black schools were torched to the ground.
Then on July 30, 1865 another massacre took place, this time in New Orleans. A state convention had been called to vote on a volatile plan to give the franchise to blacks and take it away from some Confederate leaders. A crowd of blacks cheered for the new legislature as it entered to do its work and this crowd was attacked by a bigger mob of enraged whites. 34 black people were killed along with four liberal whites.
These riots are not famous in American History but probably should be. They were famous at the time and the entire North was aroused. The Radicals cited these riots as proof that the South was simply never going to behave as if it had lost the war unless it was forced to. Critics of the President said that his weak and lenient Reconstruction policies had been the cause of the deadly riots.
Later historians with Klanlike tendencies explain the riots as the fault of the North. Professor Bowers in his best-selling book The Tragic Era explains the mass murders as unfortunate but quite understandable;
“In Memphis a group of boisterous drunken negroes, recently
disbanded, interfered with the police in the discharge of a
legitimate duty, shot an officer, and precipitated an
indiscriminate slaughter of the blacks by the rowdy
element in the community. In New Orleans, the revolutionary
plan of the Radicals to enfranchise the negroes for party
purposes, by an illegal summoning of the delegates of an
extinct Constitutional Convention of two years before,
aroused the indignation of all and the murderous wrath of
the lower classes, and culminated in a massacre. … The purpose
was to seize on power and hold it with the army, for the negroes
and the carpetbaggers. … Had there been no convention, there
would have been no massacre; and there would have been no
convention without the encouragement of the Radical leaders in
Washington.”
Bowers
But bad Bowers is just getting warmed up. His useful description of the riot is of course marred by a selection of only the facts and angles he wants. He conspicuously doesn’t give the casualty figures. They would not correlate very well with his version of the riot.
Then the rattle of a drum --- and down the street the
flying of a flag --- and a procession of negroes,
intoxicated with a feeling of triumph. On they marched
until, at Canal Street, a white man jostled a marcher,
who struck the white. On to Mechanic’s Institute, where
the convention was to sit, and there they paused to hurrah.
Some of the blacks were armed, and the first shot was
fired by one of these at a policeman who had arrested a
newsboy for stirring up trouble. The shot brought the police
from headquarters on the run, and they charged the
procession. The negroes threw bricks and retired into the
hall. But all the fury of combat had been awakened, and
some of the police fired into the blacks. … former Governor
Hahn, attacked by the mob, was saved by the police
fighting for his life. Not all the police turned beast by any
means, and the Chief knocked down one of his men engaged
in brutal work. Whiskey played its part; race feeling did the
rest; but the better element was not involved.
This is slick writing, glossing over white guilt, cleverly implying black guilt, and manipulating the facts with diabolical genius. A couple of questions - 1- where did the Negroes come up with bricks while marching into a convention hall? Were they carrying bricks in their shirt pockets? 2- what difference does it make if the “better element” was not involved or not? So if your side commits mass murder you say that it’s not your problem because that was only the riff-raff of your people, not your better class?
This is quite an opportunistic flip-flop. First the pro-Reb historians explain away slavery before the war by saying that most of the white people were actually poor and against slavery, and that it was only an oppressive aristocratic minority that had forced slavery on an unwilling population. Then after the war when the white mobs commit Nanking like atrocities on blacks you say that the better class was not present during those deeds, so don’t judge the true South by them. First you disown the Southern rich and then you disown the Southern poor, all in the name of expedient racism. And since when were the police considered not part of the “better element”? What were they, the dregs of society? They led the riots in both cities. The better element was involved. The South’s ‘finest.’
And were the other wanton murders and beatings absolved because one witness reported one policeman stopping one rioter from excessive cruel violence?
MOBILE ROCKS
E.B. Long says it happened on May 25, 1865. A Mobile history website says it happened on May 26, 1865. A website on disasters says it happened on May 20, 1865.
What happened was that a CSA ammo depot exploded and tore a portion of downtown Mobile up into the sky like a little Hiroshima bomb. 20 tons of TNT went ka-boom. There is no definite figure for casualties, but 300 seems to be the best estimate minimum.
Northern newspapers accused the bad guys of setting off the explosion in an act of unrepentant defiance, but it seems unlikely that they would destroy their own city to teach the Yanks a lesson.
I say it happened on May 23 and 321 people died. History is fables and stats agreed upon or at least asserted convincingly.
RECONSTRUCTION, ‘THE SECOND CIVIL WAR’
In 1945-46 the American people quickly got over its hatred for both the German and Japanese people they had just been at war with. The American people were not as quick to forgive and forget with each other in 1865-66. Some of that Southern blood is still boiling from the lost cause of the Civil War. I mean today. The passions of 1866 can only be imagined.
There were many controversial questions to be handled.
Was the post Civil War America a nation of 36 or 15 states?
Was the newly freed black man to be allowed to vote?
Would the lands of the Southern planter aristocracy be confiscated and redistributed to poor blacks that otherwise had no way to avoid starvation? Reconstruction would have to solve the insoluble.
The standard white argument was the view (supported by most historians until about 1965) that the freed slaves should first have to go through some sort of vague transitional period before they should be eligible to vote. They were too ignorant to vote. They weren’t ready for the vote, much like the Philippines weren’t supposedly ready for independence in 1902.
This might imply the reasonable argument that the whites simply wanted the Negroes to be educated first. But did they want them to be educated at all?
While the Southern whites endlessly complained about ‘outside interference’ they would not vote for a single nickel out of their own funds to build a school or pay for the education of a single black pupil, let alone the training of a black single teacher. There was never any specific plan to help the black person through this proposed transitional period of who knows how many years. Blacks had to get an education first in order to vote and they would make damn sure they would not get it. No, they didn’t want blacks to be educated. They simply wanted to use the illiteracy of the slaves as a pretext for post-war racial oppression.
Whites of course did not have to pass any literacy test to vote. Plenty of embarrassing Hillbillies voted all the time, before during and after the war.
Its silly for the textbook historians of the 1930’s 40’s and 50’s to back up the Southern position that immediate enfranchisement of the freed African-American slaves would have been a foolish error.
Lets get real. How much ‘education’ did a black person need to make the right decision in the 1866 elections? They didn’t need to read nor write to know which party enslaved them and which one saved them. They had education enough to answer that question. The scars on their backs were their diplomas.
The parade of angry historians are as bitter as their 1866 white brothers just because they know that all the blacks would have made the correct moral choice at the ballot box and voted Republican. Some of it has to do with out and out pro-Democratic/anti-Republican bias in the historical profession in general. If you can’t beat ‘em in today’s politics, at least beat ‘em in yesterday’s history.
The other criticism by the white historians of 1890 to about 1965 is that the newly freed blacks were standing around the roadsides singing and dancing and were not looking for work. If they were willing to work by God, they would have been welcomed into the community, but they weren’t so they weren't.
I think if I was a slave for 20 years with only Christmas off, the first thing I would want to do when I was emancipated would be nothing. I would probably not work for about a month, like a college grad that bums around Europe before looking for that first real job. There probably were a lot of blacks partying on the roadsides, idle and not looking for work, at least for the first few weeks of freedom. What jobs were there for anyone in that devastated land anyway at that time? Even rich whites probably couldn’t find a job unless they had land to plow, and there was virtually no currency. The economy was a nightmare. I couldn’t find a job in a tough economy in Boston in 1977! Scarlet O'Hara begged Rhett Butler for money in Gone With the Wind. She had no way to make money and she owned Tara. How were the slaves supposed to show the whites that they weren't “idle?”
When Johnson had been Vice President the Republican Radicals had mistakenly believed that he was more in line with their views than President Lincoln was. When Johnson took over the White House they quickly learned how wrong they had been.
Southerners to this day certainly are more educated in general on the subject of reconstruction than northerners. To a Yank, the era is discouraging to read about for many reason. Its complex and sometimes boring material, and it’s about a shameful subject involving racism, slavery, and political corruption, and a lot of hatred. The War had been hell but at least it had its glories too. There was little that was glorious about Reconstruction. Most postwar students in the North instinctually avoid the era.
This complexity and difficulty gives the southern redneck historians and politicians an unfair opportunity to paint their one-sided picture of it all. The standard white southern view of reconstruction, even today, is that the South was brutally victimized. An oppressive, corrupt, exploitive and purely political combination of “carpetbaggers” “scalawags” and free blacks rode on the back of the prostrate South. The blacks, who were not yet ready for full voting rights, became pawns of the Republican Party. The Republicans never helped the blacks out of the goodness of their hearts. Any help the Republicans gave to the blacks was only done in order to secure political dominance.
Besides, the orthodoxy goes, the Yankees and the Yankee Republicans were just as racist as the south but they just played a political game with black freedom.
When Johnson first assumed office he seemed to side with the Republican “Radicals” (a term I use hesitatingly, as anyone with a strong point of view about anything can be demonized with the word). AJ hinted that he favored prosecuting key Confederate leaders for treason.
But gradually his position began to evolve far from that of the Rads. He blamed individuals, not states, for the secessions. He began to outline rather lenient terms for re-entry into the Union and asserted that the business of reconstruction was to be conducted from 1600 Pennsylvania, not the Capitol Building. This did not sit well with the feisty Congressmen of the day. The battle lines between Johnson and the legislative branch were drawn hard and quickly.
Let us return again to the amazing C. Bowers for his general ‘descriptions’ of conditions in the South at the beginning of the Johnson era. No 21st Century writer can even try to explain the emotional power of a Southern historian in 1929. He has to speak for himself. The guy’s father probably fought for the South, or at least his grandfather did. No one can describe the white southern 1865 view like Bowers. He still retains it in 1929. Dig in. You will be wiser to the southern white mindset of the past,
“But for the suggestions of soldiers and agitators, the former
masters and slaves might easily have effected a social
adjustment to their mutual benefit, but this was not the game
intended. The negroes must be turned against their former
masters; it was destiny perhaps that the carpetbagger should
be served. Quite soon an extravagant notion of proper
compensation for services was to turn the freedmen adrift.
Soon they were drunk with a sense of their power and
importance.
…
Very soon they were eschewing labor and flocking to army
camps to be fed. …Freedom – it meant idleness, and
gathering in noisy groups in the streets. Soon they were
living like rats in ruined houses … Freedom meant throwing
aside all marital obligations, deserting wives and taking new
ones, and an indulgence in sexual promiscuity that soon
took its toll in the victims of consumption and venereal
disease. Jubilant and happy, the negro who had a dog and
a gun for hunting, a few rags to cover his nakedness, and a
dilapidated hovel in which to sleep, was in no mood to
discuss work.
…
Emissaries of radicalism were constantly inflaming the
freedmen with a false sense of their importance, turning
them against the native whites, encouraging their indolence
… Young colored women, gaily making their way to camps
to ‘enjoy mah freedom,’ were frequently used for immoral
purposes.
…
It only remained for the Federal government to drive the
disarmed people to the verge of a new rebellion by stationing
negro troops in the midst of their homes. Nothing short of
stupendous ignorance, or brutal malignity, can explain the
arming and uniforming of former slaves and setting them as
guardians over the white men and their families.
…
Meanwhile the Southern people were fighting for the
preservation of their civilization. The negroes would not work
… At the time, however, the negroes were warding off want
by prowling the highways and byways in the night for the
purpose of pillage….
The forest doesn’t grow enough paper to host all the words of rebuttal these passages deserve. This is what Johnson and the Radicals were working with, the canvass on which they had to draw the new picture of Reconstruction. It was the mindset that was not quite yet gone with the wind.
JOHNSON’S INITIAL TERMS, 5-65
When Congress was on vacation in May of 1865 Johnson announced that he was granting full amnesty and the return of non-human property to almost every Southerner who would swear loyalty to the USA and accept the end of slavery. There were some exceptions. Major Confederate leaders and landowners were still in peril but these could apply for pardons individually. Soon Johnson was granting pardons right and left. 90% of those who applied for a pardon got one. Turns out he’s a southerner after all! He was even known to use the ‘n’ word like any other white southerner and was a white supremacist when it came to social rights for blacks.
Johnson had clearly been a white supremacist before the war, although he later came out in favor of emancipation in order to get on the ticket with Lincoln. In 1859 on the Senate floor he reminded Senator Ly Trumbell that when the Declaration of Independence was written, “Mr. Jefferson meant the white race and not the African race.” Furthermore that when “our people speak of men being equal they do not mean the African race but regard them as an inferior race.”
During the Mexican War Andrew had supported expansion largely because he thought that Mexico would be an ideal and logical place to send the freed blacks if the south did choose to give up slavery. Johnson did not envision any integrated or even segregated society of white and black. Andrew saw America as a white nation.
In mid 1865-Johnson appointed governors to seven states. These states were required to hold conventions to draft state constitutions, which formally accepted the end of slavery, and condemned secession.
By late 1865 10 states had their constitutions in place. Johnson went before Congress on December 6 and announced that a “restoration” was now an accomplished fact. All seemed well and happy.
“Not so fast. NOT SO FAST!” cried the Radical Republicans. Not only were they unhappy with the terms, they were equally unhappy with the strong-armed way that the executive had made all the crucial national decisions in complete disrespect and disregard for the opinion of the legislative. They were not about to make it easy for Andrew Johnson to have his way with his Executive Reconstruction plan, or with anything else for that matter.
The Radicals were not happy with the way the governments of the Southern states were operating. They were especially opposed to the “Black Codes”. There is little doubt that without the Black Codes, the Radicals could never have instituted their tough policies that Southerners and historians have been so angry about for so long.
Today you can still hear Southern writers and legislators waxing bitterly about the raw deal the North gave the South under Reconstruction. But the Southern white supremacists were responsible for the bitter legacy of Reconstruction. They brought it upon themselves.
BLACK CODES, THE BOUNCED CHECK OF APPOMATTOX
Southern states invented new racist laws at the local and state level in the conquered South effectively canceling any chance for Johnson’s program of ‘Presidential Reconstruction.’
In order to deprive the blacks of their rights and return them to semi-slavery, the southern states instituted these infamous “Black Codes.” They were laws that conveniently always worked against the interests of black people and in favor of white people. It was an attempt to restore a state of white supremacy over an ostensibly free society.
The crime of vagrancy for starters, suddenly became very elastic. Blacks could be arrested almost anywhere at any time and be charged with it on almost any pretext. Punishment for vagrancy included forced labor. Hmm… Black workers who broke a contract and tried to leave could be sent to jail and would lose whatever money they had earned previously. Interracial marriage was forbidden and blacks could not serve on juries. In Mississippi a black person could be arrested for making “insulting gestures.” Segregation became a law not a custom. Land ownership and other qualifications became required in order to register to vote. These qualifications could be selectively enforced of course. Whites and blacks might have the same lack of some qualification, and only the black would be denied the vote. Meanwhile the white was handed a ticket to the voting booth.
Other new and exiting rights granted to blacks were sabotaged. A black person at last could sue a white person in a court of law. But if the white man were acquitted, a certainty with all white juries and judges, a heavy fine would be imposed upon the black person. If they then could not pay the fine they were sent into forced labor. No such punishment was meted out to whites if they unsuccessfully sued a black.
Mississippi codes prohibited blacks from owning land. Most Southern states forbade blacks from buying liquor or owning a firearm. It was ridiculous. Complete over the top oppression in a thousand ways and they had and still have the audacity to this very day to complain emotionally that Federal occupation was a searing injustice.
Slaves until 1861 had counted for 2/5 of a person in the Congressional representation. Now they were to count as full persons. The South would gain as many as 12 new Representatives in Congress as a result of its new citizens. These citizens wanted to vote Republican by about a 99-1 margin but the South wouldn’t let them vote at all. To the Republicans, it seemed like the South was winning the political spoils of a war it had lost. All of this added to the Republican determination to stop the Reconstruction program and declare it null and void at the December Congress of 65. But history books say that the Radical Republicans stopped Johnson’s Presidential Reconstruction plan just to be obstructionist partisan knaves.
The Black Codes were the beginning of the bounced check of Appomattox. It appeared to the Northern people that the war had been fought for no reason if the South were allowed to write its own post-war settlement.
If the war, as so many historians suggest did not begin over slavery, it certainly wore slavery on its sleeve by the time it ended. The mass employment of black troops in the Union Army in the last year of the war certainly changed the playing field a little bit. There were thousands of black troops taking bullets for the cause in full dress uniform. Maybe the South could have gotten away with the post-war black codes if the war had ended quickly one way or another in 1862. But after all those years social revolution in the Union Army, you couldn’t casually slip re-oppression of the blacks over on the North without a fight. They had shed their blood too. They had every right to say no way to any reconstruction plan that was oppressive to their race.
The co-author of this chapter, Clause Bowers, has these passages to offer in actual audacious support of the infamous ‘Black Codes.’
“ It was made a crime to give or lend deadly weapons,
ammunition, or intoxicating liquors to the freedmen,
and this was denounced as discrimination. …
… The vagrancy laws, so desperately needed and so
bitterly denounced, were little different from those of
Northern states. Nor were they so severe as those
enforced by the military authorities … Thus the higher
army officers on the ground, familiar with conditions,
sought to serve both races through the rehabilitation of
industry. This too, was the intent of the Black Codes
of the South. An eminent historian has pronounced
these laws for the most part ‘a conscientious and
straightforward attempt to bring some sort of order
out of the social and economic chaos,’ and in principle
and detail ‘faithful on the whole to the actual conditions
with which they had to deal.”
So he found an eminent racist historian (which he doesn’t name) to verify his own. As for Northern vagrancy laws, the vindictive selective enforcement of these laws in the South is the issue, not whether the same laws were written on the books in both regions. The Black Codes were a mass fascist conspiratorial disgrace, not the logical expedient consequence of managing difficult conditions.
Over the next 100 years, in fact, the South would devise a hundred different ways to deprive the African-Americans of their precious vote. The poll tax forced the poor blacks to stay away. They could not afford to pay for this fee for voting and the voting station operators could and did look the other way on the matter when the poor whites showed up. Registration laws were enforced and designed with discrimination in mind. There were literacy qualifications, and property requirements. These were unfair and discriminatory even before we consider their corrupt select enforcement.
Yet another act of oppression was the ‘understanding clause.” By this law, an illiterate white could qualify for the vote by saying he “understood” the question. Blacks would be denied this privilege, of course. The black trying to register to vote certainly “understood” that he was being robbed.
THOSE NO GOOD RADICALS
Stevens, Sumner, Wade, McGillicutty;
The Republican Radicals were in a political war on two fronts, both with the South and with their President. They have been condemned by historians for a hundred years and only recently have been somewhat rehabilitated. Better late than never. The discrediting and condemnation of the Radicals by our history textbooks is part of American history. If some proper revisionist adjustments have been made it doesn’t change the injustice of the bashing they took in history for only trying to do the right thing.
Were there times when the Rads were too extreme? Yes. Did they have their share of imperfect characters? Yes. But look at what they were up against. From 1776 to 1865, slavery had been the focus of evil in the United States. After 1865, the semi-slavery imposed by unrepentant Rebels on innocent blacks was the next worst thing in American history, second only to slavery itself. If I have to pick a team, I’m going with the Radicals, even with all their faults.
The two most hated Radicals by far in the South were Thad Stevens and Charlie Sumner, the latter whom we have already met at the end of Preston Brooks’ cane.
The #1 was big Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania. Stevens was a sour, dour, bitter, unforgiving man of moral sternness, my hero. Thaddeus was as unlikable and cheerless as a successful politician can possibly be. Thad was all business. No charm. Every historian has to use the word “bitter” every time they mention him, as though they knew him personally. He monopolizes the word in the textbooks. The USA history profession for over a century has bashed him relentlessly. But in recent years it has begun to turn. Now he’s at least getting an evenhanded hearing between qualities and faults.
Basically Stevens thought the South was an evil empire and had to be punished, occupied and strictly governed by the occupying forces. He did not trust the south to honor its surrender, and believed that only by force would the black man and woman get a fair shake there. For these opinions he is called “bitter”. Well maybe there are times when a man has a right to feel “bitter.” It makes be bitter to read that Thad Stevens was called bitter just because he wanted the South to put an absolute stop to the random lynching of black people.
Most of the historians up until about 1970 seem to think that his bitterness (he and his kind) was a major factor in preventing an amicable and healthy reuniting of the states back into Union. If only the Radicals had taken a positive and forgiving attitude, all the violent reaction of the south could have been avoided. To many historians it was the pompous phony moralists of the North that created the lynching, the Jim Crow laws, the voting discrimination against blacks, and the Ku Klux Klan. The South was only reacting to dirty deeds from the North. They blamed the abolitionists for causing the Civil War and now they blame the radical liberals for creating the reactionary atmosphere in the Post-war South.
This is the clear message for example in the first blockbuster film ever marketed for the mass public, The Birth of a Nation (original title was The Klansman) in 1915, as well the propaganda dime novel turned famous movie, Gone With the Wind, in 1939.
These historical verdicts are slowly being revised, thank Christ, but the old versions are slowly being forgotten as though they had never dominated the schoolbooks of our elders and poisoned our national mind.
The big charge against the Radicals is always that they were “politically motivated.” So what? Where does idealism end and political motives begin? All actions can be called politically motivated. Thad Stevens was accused of partisan motives. In an 1867 speech he said that he admitted to a party purpose, “For I believe, on my conscience, that on the continued ascendancy of that party depends the safety of this great nation.” Is it a crime to back the party that supports your moral views?
For too long the Abolitionists, then the Radicals were the bad guys of American history, when they were clearly the good guys. The damage from decades of misinformation is part of who we are and the new version of the story doesn’t undo all the damage done for over a hundred years by the old one. The bashing of the Abbies and the Rads by the US History profession from 1900 to 1965 is a stain on our history and worth examining in detail.
There is more material on this in the SOURCES segment at the end.
ASSASSINATION ACCUSATION
In 1865 the Radicals pursued the idea that Andrew Johnson might have been in conspiracy with the Lincoln assassins! On April 14, 1865, the night of the attacks on Lincoln and Seward, a man named Azerodt was actually assigned to kill the Vice President but he never entered the Johnson household. Now it was being was alleged by Butler that Azerodt might have merely made a show of visiting the Johnson home without entering it in order to cover up Johnson’s role in the conspiracy. The only evidence for this spectacular charge was the testimony of a felon in a penitentiary. But felon would not go public with his story unless he was granted a pardon for his own crimes. This was not about to happen and the idea that Johnson, like another Johnson 98 years later had conspired to kill his boss became an underground and unproven theory believed by many.
13th AMENDMENT PASSED
Since the nation had begun operating under the Constitution in 1788 not one new Amendment had been passed, although many had been proposed. That changed with the passing of the 13th Amendment.
On December 18 of 1865 by a vote of 119 to 56 the Constitution finally did what Franklin wanted it to do as early as 1787. It abolished slavery officially and forever in the USA. The blacks had been free for a few months but in the back of some of their minds there was always a faint possibility that it could be reinstated through a succession of new laws and some crazy sequence of events. Now it was extinct for good. But that didn’t mean that ‘everything’s roses’ for the blacks in the South as we shall see.
39th CONGRESS 12-65
Later, in December of ’65, the 39th Congress met in Washington. There were 39 Republicans and 11 Democrats in the Senate.
The Republican majority prevented the new Congressmen of Johnson’s “restoration” states from taking their seats.
The Republicans then formed the Joint Committee on Reconstruction to investigate the situation in the South. The committee heard witnesses from all walks of life and concluded that the South was not honoring its obligations and that the Black Codes had to go.
The Reconstruction issues dominated the news inside and out of Congress. But a few other things concerned the country. Civil Service reform, the tariff, income tax, and currency controversies were also on the table.
Congressman Thomas A. Jenckes of Rhode Island introduced a bill to reform the Civil Service. Anyone who is paid by the US government is a civil servant. Since Andrew jackson introduced the “spoils system” giving government jobs to those most loyal to him personally rather than to those most capable of performing well, things had gotten out of hand.
At the very least, Jenckes felt that reform could be introduced to the base of the pyramid, the lower levels. The guy that sweeps the floor at the post office. There was no reason we couldn't start there. These jobs were the least important but were the most numerous.
CIVIL RIGHTS ACT 4.9.66
In early 1866 the Civil Rights Bill was passed (over Johnson’s veto) which directly addressed the problem of race and guaranteed in writing all the freedoms to black people that white people already enjoyed. African-Americans were asserted to have full citizenship and the insane Dred Scott decision was at last negated. The Black Codes were specifically ordered abolished. The most important clause in the Act was the next to last. It warned the South that the Act had Jacksonian teeth.
SEC. 9. And be it further enacted, That it shall be lawful for the President of the United States, or such person as he may empower for that purpose, to employ such part of the land or naval forces of the United States, or of the militia, as shall be necessary to prevent the violation and enforce the due execution of this act.
FREEDMEN’S BUREAU BILL
In another bill the Freedmen’s Bureau was increased in size and scope and became a web affecting almost every part of life in the post-war south. The Bureau opened schools and more importantly, had it’s own courts. Blacks could finally sue whites and settle disputes of all sorts with them in a proper and fair manner. If the local and state courts in the South would not provide blacks a fair shake but the Freedmen’s courts would.
SWING AROUND THE CIRCLE 1866
Andrew wanted to sell his Reconstruction plan directly to the people, and over the heads of the Congress. He embarked on a summer of 66 speech-making tour of several Northern cites.
But Johnson was more than once heckled mercilessly and lost his temper. He never would have lasted as a stand-up comedian, I can tell you that much.
One crowd in Indianapolis laughed at him while he shook his fisted papers and traded insults with the snipers. General Grant was with him at the time and got up from his chair, walked to the front of the podium and shouted to the hecklers to, “Go home and be ashamed of you!” But even the venerated Grant could not stop the laughter as Johnson stood behind him red with rage. It was an embarrassment for the Administration. From city to city a persistent theme of the heckling was “What about New Orleans!”. The riots had greatly impressed the North. The president was intemperate in his speeches as well as his response to hecklers. Andrew shouted to a crowd in Cleveland for example that it was time we “Hang Thad Stevens!” To a hackler in Harrisburg Johnson said, “ I should have my brain removed, sir, so we can at least have this debate as equals.”
14TH AMENDMENT
After winning the passage of the Civil Rights bill, the Republicans then came up with the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which was also opposed by President Johnson.
14 told Southern states that they could not deprive blacks of citizenship. It did not grant the vote to the black man, but it told the old Southern states that they if they did not give him the vote, they would lose the representation of its black population in Congressional apportionment.
There was more. The 14th made it illegal for anyone who had held state or federal office and then served in the Confederacy ineligible for a return to federal office, unless pardoned by a 2/3 vote of the United States Congress. It was also declared illegal for anyone to pay off a Confederate debt.
14 passed the Congress in 1866. Tennessee ratified it immediately. But the rest of the Southern states would not ‘follow me to Tennessee.’ The Northern states had a tough enough time with it. New Hampshire and Connecticut passed it early on in 66, but the other Northern states delayed and debated for some time. It wasn’t until the beginning of the summer of 67 that Northern states fell in with the suggestion. The difficult debate over it in the North encouraged the Southern states to defy it when it was their turn to vote.
Johnson gave open encouragement to the Southern States trying to stop 14.
It would take two years and a little more blackmail to get the Southern states to grant the black man the vote. Four new states were about to be admitted to the Union. The four were required to ratify the 14th Amendment before they could become full states. This secured the passage of the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution.
ARM IN ARM CONVENTION – AUGUST 14-16 – 1866 - PA
Democrats were openly declaring that theirs was the party of white supremacy. Johnson needed some distance from that end of it just as surely as from the lefty Radical Republicans.
Some of the anti-Radicals in the Republican party floated the idea of a new political party formed of Republican moderates and old time Democrats. They would call themselves the National Union Party and hoped to win seats in the new Congress of 1867. AJ was all over it. Johnson knew that he had little hope for being elected in 1868 as a Republican or a Democrat, so he had extra enthusiasm for the National Union idea as his only hope for keeping his job as President.
The National Unionists held a convention in Philadelphia in August of 1866. More than 7,400 people attended, including many famous Senators, Congressmen, writers, and publishers. Vallendingham, “Clem the Coopperhead,” was there along with Horace Greely, and Fernando Wood, the Mayor of New York City. Some of the old Copperheads (Northerners with Southern sympathies during the war) agreed to leave the Convention because some of the important Northern men would not remain otherwise.
The NUP theme of reconciliation and bi-partisan compromise was showcased when delegates from South Carolina and Massachusetts marched arm-in-arm up the aisle to make the opening speeches. This event got a lot of sarcastic press coverage and thus the event came to be known as the “Arm-in-Arm Convention.”
Nothing ever came of all this effort. No NUP candidate won a seat in the 1866 election, or even got on a major ballot. The NUP existed only for the three days in August when they launched their Inaugural convention.
Two of the men who had marched arm-in-arm got into a bar fight later on that evening.
CONGRESSIONAL ELECTIONS 1866
As a result of the swing around the circle, the circle of opinion swung around against the president. The Congressional elections of 1866 were very good indeed for the Republicans. By the end of 1866 the Radicals were stronger than ever and ready to implement their own program of reconstruction over the head of the head of state.
Just as surely as liberal historians stress (accurately) the fraudulency of voting procedures in the Jim Crow South at the expense of the black man, so the slick redneck historians stress the fraudulency (inaccurately) of the early post war elections at the expense of the white man.
Freidel of Harvard points out angrily that local registrars could easily discriminate against whites to make sure that the Republicans win. The black vote would surely go 99% for the Republicans, so the Republicans tried to whiteout the voting demographics in the South, he charges. The laws on disqualifying former Confederates were selectively and dishonestly enforced. In Florida and Alabama the blacks were in the minority but were the majority of registered voters.
Too many freed slaves spoil the broth. Back in 1783 when Cornwallis surrendered to the American Army, a band playing the tune, ‘The World Turned Upside Down’, marked the ceremonies. Well that was chump change compared to the reversed order in the postwar South. Not only was the black man being given the vote, much worse he was exercising it to elect black legislators! The unbridled audacity!
Many blacks ran for office in the South and won with the help of the black vote. It was ex-slaves electing ex-slaves to office and nothing made the rednecks angrier. Several were sent to the US House of Representatives. The Southern State Houses were packed with blacks. The South Carolina legislature was black majority. Southern white racists were boiling beyond measurement. In time they would correct this miscarriage of justice. By 1900 a Southern black had a better chance of going to Mars and back on a bicycle than he had to win a seat in the US Senate.
The red-neck historians have avenged these events by describing and depicting the Southern black legislators as illiterate embarrassments, behaving like junior high school kids abusing a substitute teacher. In the movie Birth of a Nation the black politicians have their feet up on the desk with their shoes off. They are creating total chaos and disorder and tossing things around and laughing while the white legislators hang their heads in frustrated disbelief.
RUSSIAN-AMERICAN RELATIONS – MIANTONOMOH MISSION
The war ended with both Russia and America deluding themselves into thinking that this was the beginning of an eternal friendship. Russia had befriended America in the Civil War only because both shared a common fear of English economic dominance, and Russia had sent its fleet to NYC for selfish reason designed as altruism.
The Czar of Russia was Alexander II. Big Al was destined to die like Lincoln, at the hands of the assassin. But that was not to happen until 1881. Meanwhile on April 24, 1866 a lone assassin pulled out a pistol to kill the Czar as he travelled in his fancy carriage down a Moscow street. The assassin was named Karakazov and he hated the Czar because he had given emancipation without land. A cap-maker named Komissarov was going home from work that day and 'Oh my God, there he is, my Lord the Czar himself.' Komissarov just happened to be there when the Czar's carriage was passing by and he was honored to stop and gaze at his nation's leader. Karakazov and Komissarov were standing next to each other when the assassin drew pistol, aimed and fired. Just in the nick of time, Komissarov struck the arm of the assassin and deflected the shot into the sky. The failed assassin was apprehended and barely escaped being lynched by a street mob. Its a good thing they whisked him away so they could hang him ten months later.
In the meantime the cap-maker became the feted hero of Russia. The Czar had him visit the palace and meet the Czarina more than once. He was given enough titles and gifts to change his life forever.
When President Johnson and the Congress heard about this they reacted. They never forgot the warm kindness that Russia had supposedly shown the United States during its 'Time of Troubles.'
Congress passed a dramatic resolution thanking Providence from saving the life of our friend the great Czar and thanking Russia for standing by us in the war. The Congressional resolution looked forward to “a thousand years of Russian-American friendship and trust.” Congress then financed and authorized a goodwill Naval mission to Russia to deliver the proclamation to the Czar in person. Johnson signed off on it.
The Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Gustavus Fox, was chosen to make the long voyage to Russia at head of the 'We're Glad You Weren't Assassinated' tour.
The two ships were the ironclad monitor Miantonomoh (pronounced like Guantanamo), and the smaller steamer Augusta.
On the way to Russia Fox visited several European capitals. In Paris Napoleon III tried to disavow responsibility for the actions of Max III in Mexico City, and also tried to explain that “Russia is not your friend. Russia is only thinking of Russia.” Fox just chalked it up to bitterness.
The two ships reached Russia in August 1866 and were given the ticker-tape parade treatment all over Russia. Russian and American flags draped windows by the hundreds wherever Fox went. There were toasts and dances and ceremonies and tours, all of a super-positive nature. Over and over was the sentiment expressed that Russian-American friendship was permanent.
Fox met with the man who saved the Czar's life and gave Komissarov the key to the city of Washington, (like he was ever going to go there.)
RECONSTRUCTION ACTS – 1867-
Under the Congressional Reconstruction program, the states would have to register all voters and then call state conventions to draft and ratify new state constitutions. Then they could apply to the US Congress for readmission.
Such cooperation was not happening, so on March 2, 1867 the Great Reconstruction Act was passed over President Johnson’s veto. Since the southern states would not play ball, the Congress closed up the playing field. Until further notice the South was to be administered not as states, but as five large military districts. They were to be governed, not by governors, but by former Union generals, each at the command of an occupying army. The bitter southerners, many to this day, feel that the wrath of the vindictive North was thrust upon the South. I say it was the wrath of a just God. You enslaved a race, then you lost a war, now it was time to pay your debts.
“INJUSTICE” OF RECONSTRUCTION AN INJUSTICE
The Reconstruction Acts of 1867 caused bitterness on the part of the South that has lasted so far forever. Congressional Reconstruction has been called vindictive and a host of other bad words by angry historians.
But the most infuriating part was the one that gave blacks the right to vote. It was one thing to set them free. Emancipation was bad enough, but the vote? Well, now them’s fightin’ words.
White southern intellectuals speaking for the common folks make the same furious complaints. They weren’t literate! They were not ready for the vote! The instant enfranchisement of the freed slaves was an injustice forced upon the South at gunpoint, a great shame on our history.
This anger about black voting rights after the Civil War is carried well into the twentieth century by some of the greatest historians. It wasn’t until the 1970’s that history books began to correct this anti-democratic racism (black historians a little sooner.) It was a racist take on the problem of racism. The relatively liberal Muzzey for example writes in 1933 that the blacks were, “utterly unfit for the exercise of political rights” and that Congress had “deliberately forced Negro suffrage on the South at the point of a bayonet.”
Well too bad, Muz. That was the only way the blacks were going to get the vote and the only way they were ever going to be treated with respect. Better at bayonet point on both counts than not at all. The blacks had some back pay coming. Democracy means the vote, and if whites since 1776 had never been asked to pass through a training phase to win the right to vote, there was no reason in fairness to ask a single black to do the same. Jacksonian democracy was praiseworthy when it was applied to frontier whites in 1828, but in 1868 it suddenly deserves condemnation for some reason.
Or how bout the popular historian William Elson whose History of the United States of America was reprinted in more than a dozen editions. He says that, “Congressional Reconstruction was thorough, drastic, merciless; a study of it enlists our sympathies with the South.” I agree. A study of enlists my sympathies with the blacks in the South, but I’m sure that’s a distortion of his point. “Had it not been for the summary negro laws made by some of the southern states in 1865 … the North would not have sustained Congress in its methods of procedure.”
The point?
What kind of argument is that? Now let me get this straight. If not for the overwhelming fascist oppressive black codes imposed upon the blacks, denying them all the freedoms they had coming and subjecting them to mass violence and endless terrifying injustices, the northern states would not have even backed Congressional reconstruction.” That’s quite true, birdbrain. Elson thinks he’s making reconstruction look unfair by citing proof that it was just and necessary. Minimizing the evils of the fascist black codes by employing euphemistic phraseology (“summary negro laws”) is poor and slick and won’t do the trick. As for the “merciless” reconstruction, Professor Elson could have just as easily chosen the word “merciless” to describe the black codes. But selective emotional add-ons are the tools of low historical bias, and always have been. The historians even when writing about the antebellum South tend to simply write that “disobedient blacks were sometimes whipped,” and never write that blacks were whipped “mercilessly.” All of the extra emotional tag lines go to the poor post war southern whites, revealing major league race prejudice in the historical science, which is a stain on the story of America. The story is stained and the story of the story is stained too. And Elson is far from the worst of that crowd of historians. That’s the real scary part.
It’s hard to find an American historian that doesn’t emphasize the hypocrisy of the covert racism of the North, rather than the overt racism of the south. They proudly point out that only six Northern states allowed the vote for blacks in Johnson’s time. It seems like the Northerners were the bad guys in the post-Civil War era.
So what if the North was hypocritical? Why is that the main issue? Two wrongs don’t make a right. The issue is the larger one of right versus wrong, not whether one side was hypocritical or not.
Voting rights for the races was a case of the old South’s’ best pal, states rights, coming back to bite them. The Republicans could not so easily give the vote to blacks in the loyal northern states, which had retained full states rights by not seceding. It could however install this progressive legislation in states of the south which had just lost a war and lost the very states rights they had gone to war to defend.
So we concede the point. The Northern people weren’t perfect. There was social racism there aplenty and they weren’t eager to grant the vote to blacks at the same time that their progressive leaders were forcing it on the South. Indeed. True story. But the blacks in the South were due for some serious compensation for the slavery that had been put on their backs for the first 78 years of the Republic in the south. If this came in the form of advanced voting rights compared to the North, so be it. Progress to compensate for regress.
Yet as late as 1986 great historians like Dan Boorstin were still far angrier with the North for depriving the Southern whites of their vote than they were with the Black Codes deprived blacks the vote and caused the reaction. To these writers the Republicans “said that they loved liberty, but really they were afraid of it. They were afraid to give political liberty to their old enemies.”
The other endless gripe by the historians is that the Republicans only wanted to give the vote to the blacks so they could dominate the nation politically!
Well, yeah.
No kidding.
So?
What what’s wrong with that? Why play politics at all if not to actually try and win elections. Why is this a crime? Why is this immoral? They yell shame shame as though the Republicans were not entitled to try their best to squeeze out every last damned black vote that was there for the taking in the South. These were the same blacks whose lack of the vote had enabled the South to dominate American politics for the first 80 years of the Republic. But no historian is full of rage over that. That was somewhat a ‘political gesture’ I would say. The South had gladly taken the 2/5 of a person bonus for black representation in Congress in those prewar decades, while giving them only the right to be whipped for their numerical contribution. By putting these black votes in chains, enabled the South was able to disproportionately control the US government and its lawmakers for those years, but no eggheads are mad about that. But after the war if the Republicans wanted to control American politics by winning elections with the help of grateful black voters, then somehow this is immoral. They think they have delivered a touché when they write that the Republicans wanted to use the black vote to put Republicans in power.
The implication is that there was not also sincere ideological considerations involved at the same time. By this logic you can take any party that has ever won any election in any country at any time and say that the only reason they ever did anything or made any ideological pronouncements was merely to win elections. It is specious and pathetic. It would be almost laughable if it didn’t get etched in stone in American history books until the 1970’s.
I will cite some examples of this historical writing in the source section at the end of the chapter.
TENURE OF OFFICE ACT 3 –2 –1867
March 2, 1867 was a momentous day in US History. On that day both the Reconstruction Act and the Tenure of Office Act were passed over the President’s veto.
The Tenure of Office Act prohibited the President from dismissing cabinet members without the approval of the Senate. Not only was it a blunderbuss attack on presidential prerogative, it had the specific design of maintaining in Johnson’s cabinet the Radicals who had been placed there in Lincoln’s time. It was well known that Johnson was pining to remove some of these pains in the neck, especially the Secretary of War Edward Stanton.
Stanton was against almost everything Johnson stood for, said and did. Stanton had already supported Radicals against Lincoln while serving in that cabinet. Johnson didn’t need a double agent in his camp. It was only a matter of time before AJ showed ES heel of his Tennessee boot. Shortly after Congress broke up for the summer, Johnson fired Stanton and replaced him with General Grant. Firing Stanton would be a clear challenge to the Tenure of Office Act. When interviewing Grant for the job the President (mistakenly) thought the General to be supportive of him in his struggle for power with Congress.
When Grant learned that the Congress was conspiring against Johnson to challenge Stanton’s dismissal he locked up his office at War, went to Stanton and gave him back the keys. Johnson was enraged at Grant’s treachery, but Grant claimed he had never consented to taking sides in an attempt to undermine the authority of Congress. Grant felt he had been deceived into taking Johnson’s side when he agreed to take the job at War. Johnson felt that Grant had betrayed him.
What Grant believed before during and after the Stanton affair is still one of ‘histories mysteries.’ Grant would puff on his cigar and sit quietly in almost any situation and it is highly possible that Johnson took this silence as acquiescence, when in Grant’s mind he was simply being given a presidential order and felt it his duty to take the job at the top of the War Department.
The longtime friendship between Johnson and Grant came to an end
with the Stanton affair, never to be repaired. After traveling around the country trying to help Johnson during the famous ‘swing around the circle,’ Grant would now almost please Johnson more by a swing at the end of a rope. Johnson’s unforgiving attitude was a blessing for the Republicans who wanted to make Grant their candidate for President in 1868. The friendship between the two had made it a delicate matter to support Grant over his friend Johnson. Grant would not likely go along with that. But since Johnson now was now not on speaking terms with the old general, it was no sweat to ask Grant to stand for the Republican nomination at the 1868 convention.
These events were all leading to the impeachment of Andrew Johnson, the first such episode in USA history. That would come next year. But first a sidebar for some lessons in terminology that will be popular for about the next 35 years of US history.
BASIC GLOSSARY OF RECONSTRUCTION TERMINOLOGY
CARPETBAGGERS
The Carpetbaggers were supposedly that flock of Northerners who went South so they could walk all over the prostrated land and its innocent people. The nickname came from the idea that they were unsuccessful opportunist Yankees who came South with nothing but the clothes on their back and a mission to live off the hard work and sweat of the South. They could hold all their possessions in a small rolled up piece of carpet.
The word is a substitute for substantive argument. It lumps all Yankees into a derogatory epithet, thus never giving them a chance to defend themselves. Guilty as charged by way of one word. The ‘c’ word was just a white version of the ‘n’ word. Bitter Southern historians drop this word in their writing more than ‘the’ ‘and’, and ‘a’. The carpetbaggers did this, the carpetbagger did that. The word an unfair epithet is a cheap-shot catchall condemning without a hearing every Northern white who took part in Southern government in this era. It even has the two g’s in the middle to give it an authentic racist ring.
Yet the carpetbaggers brought a lot of money and power with them when they came south to live and work. Without their help, the South could never have rebounded as well or as quickly as it did.
The South wanted to rejoin the USA. Yet the racist whites condemned all who came here from the North as ‘invaders.’ Inter-state migration is and has always been a great American tradition and a mark of our great American freedom.
There are scores of historians who denounce ‘carpetbagger and negro rule’ in the postwar south. But the Northern invaders never constituted a majority in a Southern state legislature and as for the blacks; they held a majority briefly in one state only, South Carolina. The “carpetbagger and negro rule” oppressing the honorable and good Southern whites under Reconstruction is a lie.
SCALAWAGS
The word comes from a part of the Shetland Islands called Scalloway, where diminutive runty cattle were native. The loyal whites were supposedly similarly small and unattractive. Scalawag was just another epithet for people the Southerner white supremacists hated. These were the quislings of the south, native whites who co-operated with the Republican Reconstruction program. They were very unpopular. Traitors die fist. There are scalawags in Iraq today, helping the Americans rule their country. The scalawags were those who had supported the Union at the time of secession or during the war. They would be allowed to vote when other southern whites could not so the ex-Rebs resented them with a passion.
BLOODY SHIRT
Senator Ben Butler rose on the Senate floor one day in condemnation of Johnson’s abysmal reconstruction policies. To emphasize his point he began waving a nightshirt stained with blood. A northern carpetbagger who had been beaten by Mississippi yahoos had worn it. The move backfired for a hundred years.
From that day until the turn of the century the term “bloody shirt” enters into the American political dictionary. It was and is a pro-South slang expression used to condemn any politician who criticized Southern behavior in the Reconstruction period.. From now on any Northern critic of the South (especially at election time) was just “waving the bloody shirt”, reliving the hates of the Civil War at a time that everyone else was trying to respectfully forget those events. Historians still use it at face value to describe the actions of Northern politicians and I wish they wouldn’t. It ascribes a simple low motive for the actions of a relatively progressive party for the time. It denies all sincerity to all politicians who wanted a strict policy of Reconstruction in order to protect the blacks and to honor the check signed at Appomattox. There is a fraction of truth to this phrase, which has made it so effective. But the other side of the motives of those accused is unfairly repressed within the expression.
REDEEMERS
The white Southern political activists of all levels who fought to restore white supremacy to Dixieland were known as ‘The Redeemers.’ These could include United States Senators as well as members of criminal racist gangs or organizations. They were going to atone for the unjust Reconstruction by seizing the governments back by whatever means necessary including voter fraud, legal challenges, intellectual sophistries, intimidation and violence. The Redeemers were going to redeem the South after its getting put down by the corrupt Yankees and their despicable Carpetbagger-Negro-Republican rule. The Redeemer name will be a part of the American story from Johnson to Garfield (1865-1880.)
KLANSMEN
The Ku Klux Klan (not ‘Klu’ Klux as some dolts misspeak) began in Pulaski Tennessee on Christmas Eve 1865 in a law office. Pulaski had been devastated by the war and by a recent savage tornado. There was nothing to do and no work. Fun had to be invented. Six men led by a certain Mr. John Kennedy invented a secret club with rituals and rules (“Ask not! What racism can do for you….”). They donned white robes with holes cut out for the eyes and went riding around having fun. Similar Ku Klux clubs began forming all over the South. It was all good fun. But soon the Klan by gradual stages took on a political character. It became more organized. It was a white Southerners club, meeting to defy the northern occupational forces and their rules. It was a secret retrogression trying to turn back the clock to the ante-bellum South and soon it became a terrorist organization.
The Klan began intimidating blacks, carpetbaggers, and scalawags. They were terrorists on horseback, Lone Rangers of racism. They kidnapped, tortured and lynched blacks and liberal whites, while hiding their identities from the authorities. The Klan’s purpose was to revive the Southern racist white supremacist culture of 1860. Their uniforms and rituals give them a mystique that has lasted even to this day, just as the nazi swastika is still the most profitable symbol a publisher can put on the cover of a paperback novel.
The Klan is a small political peanut today, but in our culture the Klan imagery is running way ahead of the Klan itself. There are more Klansmen running around in TV and movie fictional dramas, than there are Klan members in real life. TV shows and movies feign high morality in writing the evil Klan into countless tales, but they are milking the KKK's one area of excellence (organization and ritual propaganda) and promoting the power of that imagery even further.
Many USA historians as late as the Second World War were not ready to renounce the deeds of the Ku Klux. The following is from a US History book by a Mr. W. E. Woodward that is still available for borrowing at the Boston Public Library. The author implies that the Klan was primarily a righteous organization, forcing the lazy blacks to work for a living,
“ The first thing to do was to make the Negroes go to work
A cavalcade of white and ghostly figures would appear
before a negro cabin on a moonlit night.
‘Come out here!’
The Negroes would come out. “What are you doing to earn your living?’ one of the ghostly horsemen would say.
‘Who you?’
‘We’re the ghosts of the Confederate dead,’ would be the
sepulchral answer, and all the sheeted horsemen would
groan dismally. ‘Are you working at anything?’
‘No, sah,” the shivering negro would reply. ‘I’se not working now.’
‘Don’t you know that everybody around here wants field-hands?’
‘No, sah; I didn’t know that.’
‘Well, we’re telling you. You’d better have a job by tomorrow night or the Confederate dead will come to see you again. And if you are still hanging around, doing nothing but steal chickens, the Confederate dead will lay you underground.’
It was soon learned that they meant exactly what they said. The Ku-Klux had no hesitation at whipping or killing idle or disorderly Negroes, nor did they show much consideration for white men whom they considered undesirable. “
As if there was plenty of work to go round for all of the freed slaves. W. E. Woodward the respected historian is bemused at the Klan operations, not horrified at their racist repressions and violence. Four pages later he casually drops this story from his childhood,
The terror inspired by the Ku-Klux lasted for many
years after the Klan had passed away. I remember
that in the little South Carolina town in which I was
brought up there lived an ex-carpetbagger named
John Woolley. … This was in the middle eighties.
The Ku Klux organization had been dissolved so
many years back that only middle-aged men could
speak of it with personal knowledge. I heard them
talk, and resolved to do a little Ku-Kluxing myself.
I was at that time a boy of ten.
In great secrecy I fashioned a tiny wooden coffin
with a jack-knife. Then I cut out a little spade and
put it in the coffin. Next, I took a piece of paper and
drew a skull in red ink at the top of the sheet. On the
paper I wrote in childish scrawl: “John Woolley. God
damn your soul,” and continued with this rhyme:
Here’s your coffin and spade
In your grave you’ll soon be laid.
I signed the epistle, “K. K. K.” The whole concoction
wrapped in black paper, was cautiously laid by me on
Mr. Woolley’s doorstep one dark night.
W.E. was a wildly successful historian and he tells this story with no disclaimer or apology. I grew in an infamously racist community and I would never have done something like that, even as a little boy; no way. Not no way, not no how.
SQUIDS
Squids were people in both North and South who could read and write and claimed to have no opinion on any controversial matter. Like squids, they were slimy, smelly, and hard to catch.
END GLOSSARY
RAILROADS AND CATTLE
In Johnson’s time there was a frantic effort to cross the continent with railroads. Multiple thousands of laborers were bridging the ‘Great American Desert’ and they had to be fed. The region in which they worked seldom provided any food to speak of. There was little water for fishing and the arid climate and terrain made growing food a poor proposition. The solution came with cattle.
The southern triangle of Texas was loaded with wild longhorn cattle that had been introduced by the Spanish from the old world and now were growing like weeds all over south Texas. A few enterprising people decided to march the animals north to where the railroads were being built. These legendary cowboys herded the cattle north in a new nomadic lifestyle that would later inspire 34,567 boring movies in the 1950’s and 60’s. The cattle fed themselves off the wild grass and when they were delivered to the railroads they were slaughtered to feed the workers or shipped east for profit. Thus began the great cattle trails that dominated the west for a couple of decades.
One of the first drop-off points established for the cattle was Abilene Texas. In 1867 a man named Joey McCoy picked out a spot along the railroad where 12 sod houses stood. McCoy bought the town for $2,400 and it turned out to be about as good a buy as the $24 purchase of Manhattan some time earlier. McCoy constructed a hotel and a loading depot. He built the town of Abilene in 60 days. By the fall of 1867, 20 freight cars full of cattle were leaving Abilene for the east on a daily basis.
The cattle trails and the industry boomed big. Abilene was only one of many final stops along several prominent cattle trails. The Great American Desert had been converted from a completely unproductive region into a giant 19th century version of McDonalds, in this case McCoy’s. The dry grass had proven to be food after all, just not human food. Indirectly the desert was suddenly feeding the country and maintaining the men who were working on the railroad all the live long day.
The life of the cattle rustler was risky. The Texas Longhorns are today a college football team with a slogan ‘hook ‘em horns.’ The slogan had a deadly origin. Back then the longhorns were wild feisty animals that could kill people. The cowboys seldom dared to get off their horse. There was also a danger of stampeding. If something startled the cattle they could break out into mad rush and all the profits would dissipate into the desert. When this happened on the moving trail the cowboys would try to force the crazed beasts into marching in a circle over and over until they twisted themselves into the center from which there was no outlet.
At night there was such fear of a stampede that cowboys often sang songs to the cattle to keep them calm. I am completely serious.
FOREIGN AFFAIRS UNDER JOHNSON
MAXED OUT IN MEXICO
During the Civil War France had reinstated political control over Mexico and installed a puppet ruler name Maximillian.
The French puppet Maximilian was still in charge in Mexico when the Civil War ended. Johnson included a hint of his displeasure in his December 6 1865 message to Congress. Seward made the point more clearly in a dispatch to France on the 16th stating that the continued presence of a foreign monarchy on the ruins of an American republic would probably mean an end to friendly relations between France and America.
The Civil War was over but full demobilization had not yet kicked in. The American military machine was 25 times what it was in 1860 and many of these troops and their commanders were more than willing to march into Mexico and drive out the foreign power there. General Sheridan was sent of the south of Texas with a force of 50,000 troops and it was poised to make a move if France and Mexico did not.
Emperor Napoleon III knew that the Mexican situation was not good. Seward on February 12, 1866 demanded that a timetable be set for French withdrawal from Mexico.
By now the problem was not motivating an attitude in the USA for war, but trying to restrain the hawkish impulse in America to go down there and throw Max out by force. War in 1866 was not the unthinkable option it becomes after a decade of peace. And besides that, it would be a smashing victory no doubt. Mexico had been roundly defeated in 1847 by an American Army that was microscopic compared to the forces threatening that land now.
The wife of Emperor Maximilian, Carlotta, went to Europe to plead the case for maintaining support for her husband. She spoke to Napoleon’s officials, and the Pope. Their rejection of Carlotta’s supplications caused her to lose her sanity and she went Carlooney.
The Austrian portion of Napoleon III’s empire began to organize a force to go over to Mexico and save the regime but the US protested strongly to the Austrian government. Then the outbreak of war between Austria and Prussia meant that no force could be spared for a foreign adventure even if Austria had the political will. Nap deserted Max cold turkey. By the spring of ’67 all the French soldiers had left Mexico.
The rest was predictable. Maximilian as shot by a firing squad on June 19, 1867. Within 3 years Napoleon was out of power in France as a result of defeat at the hands of the Prussians.
Today Mexico celebrates its independence day not from the time it threw out the Spanish in 1821, but from the day it tossed out the French in 1867.
ALASKA 67
Alaska had been nominally under the Russian flag for a couple of centuries or so. Russian explorer Vitus Bering found his bearings and discovered Alaska back in the 1500’s. He claimed it for Russia in the style of the time. The sea that separates the two nations was named after him. Archeologists have determined that the two continents had once been connected by a landmass that was submerged when the glaciers melted. This too was named after Bering and is known now as Beringia, the Atlantis of the Arctic Circle.
Over the years Russian trading posts were established along the Alaskan coast and a few reached all the way to the present west coast of the United States. The USA and the UK ran the Russians out of that area by the mid 1800’s, but the Kremlin claim to and presence in Alaska was respected into the time of Andrew Johnson. There were no Rumsfeldian plans for US hegemony in Alaska.
But when in 1867 an opportunity arose to buy it from the Russians the Johnson team did not miss the icebreaker.
Johnson gets credit for the Alaska purchase but it was not much his doing. Andrew Johnson was not a hands-on president when it came to foreign policy. His Secretary of State Seward, who made a remarkable recovery from his near fatal wounding in the Lincoln plot, had in fact, nearly a free hand to run foreign affairs. Seward was as ardent an expansionist as James Polk but most of his dreams were not realized during his tenure of office.
The Secretary of State wanted to annex several target islands in the Caribbean as well as Canada, and the Hawaiian Islands. Some of Seward’s dreams would come true decades down the road but most Seward's prospects were frustrated in the Johnson era, partly from a national exhaustion from the war. The one notable success for this Manifest hawk was Alaska.
Russia sold Alaska because it feared it would lose it in the next war with Great Britain. A cold war had been under way between them for decades, and it had erupted into hot war in the short but bloody Crimean War of the 1850’s.
During that war, Britain and Russia had agreed to a neutral status for Alaska, making it a distant demilitarized zone, like the USA and USSR agreeing to a demilitarization of outer space in the 1960’s.
By 1867 with Lion and Bear at odds in Central Asia, the Tsar was not sure if England would make the same deal for Alaskan neutrality if another war broke out, which it might. The English ships were getting better all the time. Alaska might now look like an appetizing theatre of operations. It was deemed better to sell Alaska to the Americans, a rival of the British, than to let the mighty English Navy seize it for free. That would be a disaster to Tsar Al II (who was just recovering from an assassination attempt.) Instead of a limited prize of improved friendship with the USA and some dough, the loss of Alaska to Britain would cost the Russians in prestige. This is why the price was so low and the Russians so eager to sell. Alaska was priced to sell.
Russia's feared next war with the English never came. Russian-British relations evolved from 19th century cold war to allies in the two world wars of the 20th century. Then there was the second Cold War and the second thaw that has lasted to the present day. But no one knew the future in 1867 and we got the bargain in the bargain.
On March 30, 1867 Secretary of State Seward negotiated with the Russian Tsar Alexander II for the purchase. The final price was 7.2 million dollars. The Senate ratified the sale on October 18 after a difficult debate. Alaska was ridiculed by a few fools as being utterly worthless. They called it “Seward’s Folly” or “Sewards Icebox”. Except for its fishing it seemed to have no use. Even the fur trade up there was on the decline, much of the prime animals having been depleted.
A fantastic supply of gold was discovered near the end of the century in the Klondike, making Seward an overnight hero. Mineral resources have been explored and developed throughout the 20th century and into the 21st. The Alaska pipeline sends oil south to the 48 contiguous. Alaska of course was in the final analysis an outstanding purchase and the people who scoffed at it in 67 go down in history as pinheads.
The myth of history is that the Russians foolishly sold Alaska for a song to the USA, like Peter Minuit saying 'I’ll take Manhattan' for $24. They supposedly had no idea of the mineral wealth there and were the fools when gold was later discovered, not to even mention the oil.
In fact the Russians had a pretty good idea that American prospectors would find rich deposits of gold there sooner or later and when that happened there would be a gold rush followed by a political expansion of manifest destiny. Better to sell now before they lost it to the insatiable American expansion on the continent. If they got into a scrap with expansionist America over Alaska, Russia would lose a key alliance in its goal of competing with and containing the British.
Russia was also quite happy to box the British in to the interior of the North America continent. Russia did not want the British navy operating from the northwest coast. With American territory to the north and west, British Columbia could never directly threaten Russia again. In the 1867 Russian mind the UK was the big threat, not America. 100 years later it would be a different story.
There is a sorry side to the Alaska story.
Of the 7.2 million paid, only 7 million went to the Tsar. Of the remaining 200 boxes of ziti 136 were never accounted for. The rest went to above board expenses including legitimate consulting fees. What happened to the missing money is fairly clear but not provable. The best evidence (among much) comes from an account by President Johnson of a ride in the country he took one Sunday afternoon with his Secretary of State in 1871. The two men were going off to the country for the day so they could get hammered in peace on good whiskey. During their good time with the bottle Seward began to get loose-lipped. “Johnny,” he said (his nickname for 'Johnson'), “Did it ever cross your mind how surprisingly easy the Alaska treaty passed the Senate? - What was it, (burp) two votes against it?”
“What are you driving at, Sew?”
“Half those votes were bought and paid for by the very dough they were voting to appropriate.”
“No. Stop. I've changed my mind. I don't want to hear any more,” said Johnson.
“Well you're going to hear it,” said Seward, with a slug of whiskey. He wanted to get it off his chest. It was like Mr Smith Goes to Washington where that manly-voiced lady finally opens Mr. Smith's eyes to what a sap he's been.
“Surely you remember how much opposition there was to our buying Alaska. Even you weren't all for it. I was a one-man band. Then all of a sudden it passes the Senate 38-2? Come on Andy, open your eyes.”
Johnson grabbed a swig, let out a burp and said, “Let's hear it.”
“Thaddeus Stephens got $11,000 from Stoeckl for his vote, payable after the money was paid to Stoeckl by the US Government. He bought up the votes he needed. Stoeckl bought off a few in the Senate. And he cleaned the House.”
“Are you saying that the bill never would have passed it the Russian minister hadn't greased the skids with money paid for by the very treaty appropriation they were debating?
“In the Senate, maybe. In the House?...” Seward paused and looked at Johnson and said in a low exaggerated voice, “De-fi-nite-leeee”
“Who else? How many names are on the list?,” asked the President.
“There's 104 men altogether. Some of the bigger names leaked out but most of the others, we may just never know.”
“Who else is a slimy scum?” asked Tennessee.
“J. W. Forney got $30,000.”
Johnson inadvertently spit out his whiskey on that one and uttered a bad expletive.
“Nat Banks got at least $10,000. Not only that, a few of the newspapers who published pro-Alaska editorials got $2,500 from Stoeckl after the purchase passed.”
“All right. Stop right there. I came here to get hammered on booze, not by ugly facts. I'll be out of the office soon enough.”
So if not for avarice on both sides, the United States would never had acquired Alaska.
CANADA AND ALASKA
It was widely believed in the United States that sooner or later, some way or another, Canada was going to be ours. Manifest destiny had coveted Canada since the American revolution, that is, since long before manifest destiny was a term.
The purchase of Alaska was seen my many fools as a signal the Canada was going to fall in and join up with the growing greater United States voluntarily. If not, well who knows how we might get it?
The opposite occurred. Canada began to fear that very thing and took steps to counteract it. The movement for Canadian confederation had been growing for decades. It grew stronger during the American Civil War. Now with the purchase of Alaska, Canada felt threatened to the point where it was time to do something about it.
In 1867 most of the provinces of Canada united and became a nation. The mother country had to give its blessing, of course, and the UK did so. Canada was no longer a group of provinces, but a nation. It could now tell the United States what it could do with its manifest destiny. It sent the USA 2 million cold fronts as a consolation prize.
RED CLOUD’S WAR
It has been called the only war that the Indians won. Oglala Indian Chief Red Cloud led a rebellion against the US government.
The Bozeman Trail was at the center of the fight. This trail was supposed to be Indian country but the whites wanted to pass through. Red Cloud said no. White Cloud said yes. War came next.
Whitey lost a big one at the Fetterman Massacre. It was the second worst defeat in the Indian wars (after Custer in 1876.)
When the war ended, the whites agreed to leave the Bozeman trail. Government forts were voluntarily burned.
Red Cloud lived a long healthy life and died in 1909, but by then he was on an Indian reservation. The victory of Red Cloud’s War (also called Bozeman War) was a false spring.
THE IMPEACHMENT OF ANDREW JOHNSON 1868
Johnson did one smart thing to help his cause on the eve of his trial. He named a moderate and popular man to head the War Department.
There were fears and accusations that ‘Randy Andy’ was planning on taking complete control of the government with something of a military dictatorship. It was alleged that this was why he had to get Stanton out. Johnson supposedly needed someone he could control in the War Department. The War Department sat headless and its leadership still unofficially decided when Johnson calmly named a very moderate, reasonable and trustworthy man to the post.
Thomas ‘Pat’ Ewing was Johnson’s choice, pending the outcome of the President’s Impeachment trial, TPE's high character stopped any talk of a Johnson coup. The smart Ewing choice may have made a difference in the outcome of Johnson's Senate trial.
History judges the Rads harshly for impeaching Johnson, but I don't see it as all that evil. The only irrefutable charge against the Radicals is that they tried to overturn the balance of powers in the nation in favor of the Congressional and at the expense of the executive. They wanted to see the Presidency virtually subservient to the will of Congress. I condemn this part of their program. It is charged that the real reason they impeached Johnson was to strip the Presidency of its power, that the actual charges were allegedly a front for a larger political purpose.
The trial began on March 30, 1868. The nation followed the trial closely, to use an understatement. Gangs of reporters waited outside, ready to flash the latest to the nation and the world via the expanded and improved telegraph lines. Nothing like this had ever happened before. The Members of the House were allowed to listen in person on the Senate floor. Dignitaries from all over the world sat in the balconies. Tickets to the Senate gallery in April of 1868 were as hard to get as Elvis tickets in 1968. Charles Dickens was in the gallery (although he became a laughing stock for how often he nodded off to sleep.) Historian Bankroft was there.
A Gambling sidebar: Throughout the trial, bookies were al over Washington taking bets on whether Johnson would be acquitted or impeached. At first it was 2-1 if you bet on acquittal and 1-3 if you bet on impeachment. In other words, if you bet on conviction, you'd have to risk 30 to win 10. As the days passed, the odds went to about even, which meant you got even odds but you had to pay a ten percent vigorish to place the bet (the Bookie has to stay in business.)
However, on the eve of the trial opening, the odds had changed drastically and now you had to play 1-4 to bet on acquittal! The word was out that AJ had enough votes to win and bookies were upping the odds to 12-1 on conviction, because they couldn't get any action on it.
The bookies were all over the town and openly worked the Capitol Building. Today, Congress is fighting a losing battle against internet gambling (Barney Frank said we should just make it legal because people are going to do it anyway.) In 1868 the Halls of Congress were literally crawling with bookies, (although the Members of Congress didn't place any bets personally because it would have aroused suspicions of insider manipulations, votes for sale to win big bets they had personally placed.)
Andrew Johnson was impeached on 11 charges the first nine of which had to do with alleged violation of the Tenure of Office Act. The tenth concerned his highly irresponsibly intemperate public speeches and the question of his fitness for office. Article 11 was a general indictment of his policies and conduct.
Thaddeus Stevens led the prosecutors. Thad’s speeches were so harsh that he did his cause more harm than good. The public began to see Johnson as the underdog facing the bullies.
Johnson. “Unfortunate, unhappy man, behold your doom,” Thad warned the President. Thad was very old during all of this and sometimes was unable to finish his speeches. The last paragraphs were often read on the floor by a surrogate curmudgeon.
Also on the side of the Rads was Ben Butler another unlikable egotist with morals. Butler boasted that he would prosecute the President in the same manner as he would any horse thief. Again, boomerang assaults that hurt his cause.
The President had one key advantage in going to trial. Johnson, after standing still in office and taking arrows for years was no longer to be just a punching bag. An official impeachment trial was on. This time he had able attorneys in his corner fighting back for the defense. Ben Curtis, Billy Evarts, William Groesbeck and Henry Stanberry all acquitted themselves well while acquitting their client.
A key disadvantage of course was that Johnson was personally acquainted with the jurors, something never allowed in a regular civilian trial. The same people who hated him and voted to put him on trial were allowed to vote yeah or nay in the final verdict.
There were 54 Senators in 1868 and it would take 36 to take Johnson out of the White House. There were only 8 Dems in the Senate, and AJ could count on them. Johnson could count on four of the so-called “administration Republicans.” He obviously had to get help from a few other Republican Senators to stay in office.
In the end AJ was cleared on Article 11 by a margin of only one vote.
The Senatorial vote came on Monday 5 19 68. The final score on 11 was 35-19.
If not for Benjamin Wades’ personality, Johnson might have been convicted. With no sitting Vice-President at the time, the conviction of Johnson would have given the White House to the president pro tempore of the Senate, who happened to be Ohio’s Radical Republican Benjamin Wade. Many moderate Republicans disliked Wade and his policies. This helped to swing some votes for Johnson's acquittal.
The Republican Radicals lost the trial but won some consolation by ruining the hated Johnson’s political future. As a result of the stigma of impeachment AJ was knocked out of the running for re-election in 68. The consensus for 68 was ‘Anybody but Johnson’. He had never been a true Republican in the first place and they were happy to shut him out as a candidate in the next election. Without the impeachment cloud, it might have been improper for the Republicans to overlook him.
6 STATES READMITTED 6 1868
Having met the stern Congressional terms for readmission to the Union, six states came back in the USA in June of 1868. Arkansas came back on June 22. On the 25th the two Carolinas plus Louisiana, Alabama and Florida were recognized by Congress as their old selves reinvigorated. The rest (TX MS GA VG) would not come home until the Grant era. Tennessee had been admitted under Presidential Reconstruction in mid-1866. The volunteer state had not instituted the fascist black codes, so Congress had recognized it alone when that body had disallowed the other states. Tennessee watched most of the horrors of Reconstruction on the sidelines. It stood as a monument against those who claimed abuse at the hands of the north. If the other conquered states had behaved like Tennessee, they would have been treated as nicely.
POSTWAR NAVY
In terms of firepower and numbers, the Union had the strongest navy in the world when the Civil War ended. But most of the ships were not suited for the high seas. They had been built to win a coastal and interior waterway war. The US Navy was an ‘innie,’ not an ‘outie.’ Its inner direction was perfect for the isolationist era we were entering, and was perhaps partly responsible for it. One of the Navy’s monitors was sent around the world to show that they were in fact seaworthy but the gesture only emphasized the problem. The US Navy fell into gradual decline until Chet Arthur revived it in the late 1880's.
FRANK RICH TREATMENT FOR JEFF DAVIS 1868
In December 1868 in one of his last acts as President, AJ granted a full pardon to Rebel President Jefferson Davis. Tennessee Santa also had toys in his sack for all of the other former Confederate officials that had not yet been pardoned. By the time Grant took office, there were no Rebels left for him to pardon.
AFTER OFFICE;
Johnson refused to ride with Grant to the '69 Inaugural. There was too much ill feeling between them over the Tenure of Office affair.
For a few years Johnson tried unsuccessfully to re-enter the political arena. But then his persistence paid off. In 1874 he was elected to the US Senate from his beloved state of Tennessee. That same year, Hannibal Hamlin was elected to the Senate. Lincoln’s two Vice presidents were thus sworn in as Senators on the same day and received a rousing ovation from their Congressional comrades.
Andrew was only to work with one round of Congress. In July of 1875 he suffered a severe stroke and died on the last day of the month. He is buried beneath a willow tree he planted himself and the tree itself was grown from a shoot from a tree at Invalides, Napoleon’s tomb.
Johnson is buried with a copy of the Constitution beneath his head (Nixon has a copy in his coffin too, but under a different part of his body).
SOURCES
The American Spirit, by Thomas A Bailey, is a collection of passages from historical sources spanning the national story.
The American Pageant, A History of the Republic, by Thomas A. Bailey of Stanford – c) 1961 D.C. Heath
Tommy is a bit of an old white guy from the 1950's in his attitude towards Reconstruction and the no-good Republican Radicals. In spite of some sore spots, this is a sacred book.
Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction, Eric L. McKitrick, c) 1960 University of Chicago – Highly scholarly in style and substance. Eric believes that Johnson self-destructed, ruining his political career and doing much to block reconciliation between the North and South.
Charles Sumner and the Rights of Man, by David Donald -c) 1970
A lot in here about the Andy Johnson era and the Radicals of which Sumner was one of the fearless leaders. Donald never takes sides and that makes me take sides; against David Donald.
A Diplomatic History of the United States, by Samuel Flagg Bemis, Farnam Professor of Diplomatic History in Yale University – c) 1934 Henry Holt
He stresses that in this era of AJ, the US was essentially anti-expansionist, and lost many opportunities to grow if it had wanted to be greedy.
Bemis has a lot of his most important information in the elaborate footnotes, especially about events in obscure islands.
The Enduring Vision, by Nancy Woloch and Tom Purvis
The Fiery Cross-, The Ku Klux Klan in America, by Wyn Craig Wade 1987. A great and brave book.
The Growth of the American Republic – Vol II 1865-1937 – by Samuel Eliot Morison (HVD) and Henry Steele Commager (COL) – c)1940 Oxford NY
These guys think that the South was right to be angry with how they got treated after the Civil War. I think they are wrong and the South should be grateful it was treated as leniently as it was. The South could have been forced into progress at gunpoint like in retrospect we know it should have been.
These two Ivy League bums have an attitude as bitterly against the Reconstruction Republicans as any Southern redneck historian self-publishing today, even though they are Northern pseudo-liberals. It's like they are dying to use the term N-lover but they do not dare, when describing Northern Republicans. We can only allow them that in 1940 their viewpoint was rather common, even among Northern white historians.
The revised edition contains stories up to late 1939 but they did not revise the title and it remains at 1937 even though it goes past that.
History of a Free People by Henry W. Bragdon, Instructor of History at Phillips Exeter Academy, and Samuel P. McCutchen, Chairman of Social Studies, School of Education, New York University – c) 1954 MacMillan
These guys specialize in making US History so strict and by rote that once a student passed the grade with them they will never want to pick up a history book ever again as long as they live.
The “people” are “free” but the young students are not. They are slaves and school is prison for children. I felt that way when I was in school and now that I am a 55 year old man I still feel the same.
A History of Presidential Elections, by Eugene H. Roseboom – c)1957 – Johnson was nominated in 1868 but this book includes a connected narrative of all of US History.
You have read about the fascist atrocities that were the “black codes.”
Roseboom writes of them with a lie of omission. He simply doesn’t give any explanation of the horror that they were. The reason he does not is that his book is totally biased against the Northern radicals and takes a pro-South stance at every turn in this era. The South is the victim of the “politics of vengeance.” This is the title of his Johnson chapter. Roseboom means only the North! As if the South wasn’t conducting “vengeful” policies of it’s own against blacks.
Eugene finds space in his book to launch into detailed tirades on every miscarriage of justice that the North perpetrates against the South in the Reconstruction era. He uses weasel words. If the North reacts to the race riots with measures to protect the black people, then Sumner and his “cohorts” are “using” the riots as a “pretext” to dominate the south.
Gino also plays with sequence to his advantage. He doesn’t mention the Memphis and New Orleans riot massacres of mid-1865 until long after he established that in December of 1865 the radicals sabotaged a perfectly fair and decent Johnson plan for the readmission of the ex-Rebel states. I say that when you write of the political situation of December of 1865 you must first include the full story of both the black codes and the race riots, for both these events had everything to do with Northern obstructionism to the Johnson plan. Here’s his slick take on December 65,
“Two presidential vetoes inaugurated the struggle. The
first came when Congress passed a bill extending the
life and powers of the Freedmen’s Bureau. Originally
a war emergency creation for humanitarian purposes, it
was now to receive authority to protect the Negro against
the “black codes,” recently enacted by the new southern
legislatures to provide some measure of control over the
former slaves.”
Right. And the Nuremberg laws were enacted by German legislatures to enact “some measure of control” over those troublemaking Jews. I like the way he mentions that originally the Freedmen’s Bureau was created for humanitarian purposes, as if protecting blacks from the black codes only selfish radical politics and was not a humanitarian mission too.
Roseboom is livid over the hypocrisy of the North for wanting to give the vote to the black in the South when it wasn’t unanimously already given the black in the North. All the racist white historians moan about this non-stop,
“Three northern states [in 1866] rejected negro suffrage
at the polls. Negroes could vote in only seven states in
1868, and five of these were in New England. What was
sauce for the southern goose would not do for the northern
gander.”
“Only” seven states? That would be a valid point if there were 300 northern states. How many southern states were willing to voluntarily grant the vote to blacks? Approximately none. If southern whites could vote on it, they would have re-instituted slavery! Now we’re supposed to boil with the author’s rage that the hypocrite North could count only seven states where blacks could vote.
And why try and invalidate the states of New England just because they’re all in New England? They’re a part of our nation too, Gene. That’s not a zinger of a point, pal. Unless you’re a racist drip that will reach for any desperate argument to fit your bitter fancy. Then it’s a great point.
Again, so what if the South was forced into allowing a higher percentage of states to allow the black to vote? They owed the black people some back pay the North did not.
So the states rights issue now held now back progressivism in the north in the other states besides the admirable seven. The federal government could not impose Negro suffrage on all the states of the north. That’s’ because the north hadn’t been so seig heil about the whole thing in the first place and didn’t need to be forced to do the decent thing. They had shown that they were willing to do it on their own.
But the losing a major war knocked out southern states rights and in the post war aftermath the federal government was able to implement voting rights for blacks there that it did not have the authority to impose on the north. The South was forced to lead the way on voting rights for blacks because they had enslaved them and then had tried to oppress them with the black codes after Appomattox. The southern states weren’t forced to lead the way in voting rights for blacks simply because the northern states were so insufferably hypocritical.
History of the United States 1850-1877, Vol VI 1866-72, c) 1906, by Channing the famous – The guy is so racist it’s scary because he is so without vehemence. It’s a dry scholastic and earnest racism, as if he has spent decades studying the era and dryly stands by his honorable honest racist conclusions.
“The worst feature about the Reconstruction Acts
was … the negro rule forced on the South at the
point of the bayonet.”
For a counter-scholar rebuttal to this quote see the next book or anything by Kenny Stampp.
A History of the United States, by Boorstin and Kelly c) 1986
This is a liberal revisionist history without sickening excess.
History of the United States of America, by William Elson – c)1960 15th Edition. This book is so good that the first edition came out in 1904 and the last one on 1960.
But Elson does make one statement I have to disagree with and its one that many historians make. He mentions Johnson’s background as a “poor white” of the South. Then adds, “a class whose social standing was scarcely above that of the slave.” They always say that, and there’s an undertone of somehow debunking the perception of how evil that slavery was.
Please. I’d like to see Elson live a month as a poor white in 1859 and then a month as a slave in 1859 and come back to 1959 and type that up again the same way. The difference between being whipped and not whipped is the difference between jumping off a cliff and eating an ice cream cone.
Elson also has a typical unfair statement about the quality of black people in the immediate post-war southern world, although I can’t stress enough that compared to most historians of his time he is not one of the bad guys. I am isolating an excerpt to add to the examples piling up in the book, but William says many noble things about race relations that others of his time do not. Anyway, here is bad Elson,
“It is true that the problem of the southern whites was a
hard one. The government of millions of illiterate
freedmen, ignorant, lazy, and often vicious, required
special legislation.”
A History of the United States [Since 1865], by T. Harry Williams LSU, Richard N. Current U Wisconsin, and Frank Freidel of Harvard. C) 1965 –
This book never ceases to disappoint me and impress me at the same time. The talent here is top-notch and the work is deep, but on the race issue they fail the grade. On the Reconstruction era the book is a complete and relentless racist disgrace. I expect this kind of material from W.W. Woodward, Claude Bowers or Truslow Adams, but I never thought I would read this take on things from any book published as late as 1965 with a Harvard man’s moniker on the title. I suspect that most of the work on the post war South was that of T. Harry Williams (perhaps the most overrated historian of all time) and hopefully Freidel had little or nothing to do wit it.
From page 20,
In imposing Negro suffrage on the South … The
movement for national suffrage became too strong
to resist. Nor did the Radicals wish to resist it …It
suited Republican strategy to enshrine Negro
suffrage, the basis of Republican strength in the
South ..
In the remorseless manner in which the Radicals
drove through their program, in their readiness to
inaugurate change [they] would stop at nothing to
to attain their ends.
“Imposing” Negro suffrage on the South? Just as when they imposed the Bill of Rights on all Americans in George Washington’s time.
Another objectionable word here is ‘Remorseless.’ The writers seem to feel that the Republicans had something they were supposed to feel remorseful about. I’d like to know what Sumner, Wade, and Schurtz were supposed to feel ‘remorseful’ about.
Since 1865 seems to feel that the South had nothing to be ashamed of and the North everything to be. This logic escapes me. On the post war period,
There were substantial reasons for the minority
status of the Democrats. Their war record, or
rather the version of that record pinned on them
by their opponents, undoubtedly damaged their
cause.
War “record”? They caused the war in the name of evil. The Democratic racism of the prewar, war and the post war period was not an invention of the evil Republicans. The Democrats instigated secession, were the party of slavery, and after the war were the oppressors of the blacks through Black Codes, the Klan and Jim Crow. This isn’t just some invention that their opponents ‘pinned on them.’
The more I read this book the more disgusted I become. Every paragraph on this era is either overtly or subtly an attack on the North and a defense of the South. It is so biased in favor of the white supremacist Democratic Party of the post war South and so prejudiced against the Republican Party no matter what it does, that it must be called a dastardly book. The writing and the editing and the work overall is partisan and personal, no less so than this reaction to it.
The bibliographical essay at the end of the Johnson era is typical. I would want to say that it takes the racist history books and praises them with faint damnation, but it’s worse than that. There’s no damnation at all for such filthy racist authors as Claude Bowers, Dunning, and Paul H. Buck. Then they write of W.E.B Du Bois’s fabulous book on Reconstruction that the work ‘has value but is marred by subjectivity.’ Ya gots ta be kiddin me!
Of the redneck red in the face with rage racist Paul H Buck they say that his book ‘traces somewhat too enthusiastically the factors that healed the wounds of war.’ They certainly didn’t notice or mind the over the top racism and defense of the supposedly innocent South that fills every page of this putrid book.
Only Dunning, the 1907 inventor of the racist post-war version of American History gets a slight bit of ersatz criticism, a praising with faint damnation;
[while] The Dunning school made some excellent
contributions, its members tended to have
some favorable orientation to Democrats
and Southern whites.
“Some favorable orientation?” Are you kidding me? Such delicate wording dodging between the racist raindrops. Nice try. When they condemn the Republicans there is no such slick euphemistic writing. Suddenly they are capable or writing with sledgehammer no-holds-barred direct emotional honesty. But when they cite the racist history books it’s done with prejudicial gentility in tone and substance.
The authors would probably prefer to be even more overt in their slant than they are, but since they know they are powerhouse university historians they have to feign balance. They can’t completely ignore the evils of the South. So they make an art of praising with faint damnation. Read this version of the Ku Klux Klan activities;
“[although] The Ku Klux Klan, the Knights of the White Camelia
and others … were undoubtedly effective, their influence has
probably been exaggerated by later writers who have been
intrigued by their romantic hooded and robed apparel and their
elaborate ritual. The national government moved quickly to stamp
them out. Congress passed two Force Acts (1870-1871) and the
Ku Klux Klan Act (1871) which authorized the President to use
military force and martial law in areas where the orders were
active. Not all whites favored the hooded societies; many
disliked the violence .. The head of the Klan ordered it disbanded.
So let's get this straight; The Klan wasn’t really the monster that naïve writers from the North made it up to be; the Force Acts effectively suppressed their activities; the Klan wasn’t speaking for the South because some whites were against it; And the fact that it was once ordered disbanded by one leader in the 1870’s renders irrelevant all its activities for the next 100 years.
It wouldn’t be so serious if this were a small book for an isolated white supremacist loaded audience. These three writers were not preaching to the choir, they were influencing malleable fine minds. A History of the United States Since 1865 was one of the premiere college textbooks of the 1960’s.
I quarrel with this book because it is a serious work that promoted a racist bias on the study of Reconstruction.
The March of Democracy: From Civil War to World Power, by James Truslow Adams - c) 1933 Scribner
This was a very popular book so it is worth the spotlight.
His feeling is that slavery was right, but the North had bullied the South by force into abandoning it and he's really mad about it. And he slings the usual jive about states rights and the supposedly inherent right to secede,
“The constitutional question had been settled, as brutally, if one will, as the slave question. Both were settled not by arguments and reason but by force. Although no one doubted in our earlier history that slavery was morally just and no one could rightly affirm, not even Lincoln, that it was not constitutionally legal and protected, yet it had been extirpated by war. So, although I think it cannot be questioned that the original states in 1787 would never have formed the constitutional Union if they had explicitly understood that under no conditions could they ever extricate themselves from it, that question had also been settled by war.”
Well, Jimmy, it could have all been settled by political actions and compromise but the South wanted no part of reason. Lincoln won and the South then seceded because it was so conceited about how all its men were ten times tougher than the all the wimpy Yankees, it was sure it would win. The South resorted to open military defiance in Charleston Harbor because it thought it could whip the North like Representative Preston Brooks caning Senator Sumner in the Senate. Then when the South lost the war we get the sour grapes from JT that the North only won because the might is right route of combat had settled it, not truth or reason. Oh yeah? Well you were the ones that knew you could beat the North and you didn't, so now all of a sudden the North is morally wrong because it chose violence.
War would have been a perfectly fine way to solve it if your team had won.
By the way, he refers to Senator Sumner as a “negrophile” and rips Charlie for thinking that after the war, blacks should be granted full and equal rights.
And James T. most definitely treats the Ku Klux Klan with extremely faint damnation bordering on endorsement. This passage says more about America in 1933 than it does about America in 1866,
“It was natural that the Southern whites, to prevent this complete ruin, should wish to regain control of their own states. This was impossible if carpet-baggers and scalawags could marshall the blacks to the polls. Organizations, therefore, were formed to intimidate the negroes. Among these “White Leagues,” “Knights of the White Camelia,” and other secret societies, the most noted and effective was the Ku Klux Klan, started in Tennessee in 1866, and later an important weapon throughout the whole South. Riders, robed in white, would appear suddenly in the night and frighten negroes out of their wits in one way and another. At first little violence was used, but when the methods began to prove effective, as was shown by the big drop in Republican votes, Congress passed the Enforcement Act, and the South then met force with force. Whatever Abolitionists and theorists like Charles Sumner might say, living in white Northern communities, whites will not consent to be ruled by blacks, and the South was fighting for white supremacy. The only way to combat Congressional legislation had to be violence when other methods failed.
Congress then passed an even more rigid Enforcement Act. The Congressional policy had been criminally stupid. The white South could not be expected to submit supinely to be ruled and plundered by its former slaves.”
I couldn't hate this guy any more if he shot my dog. This is a pretty good sampling of the racist state of America History in the 1930's. Its just a watered down version of the same racism that caused the Cicil War. This is one case when I am all in favor of revised politically correct schoolbooks. This was an enormously popular history book in its day. They fact that it could so casually racist says it all.
Meet General Grant, by the despicable W. E. Woodward provided the story about the 10-year-old boy and the Klan ‘prank.’
The National Experience – Part Two, A History of the United States Since 1865, by John M. Blum, Edmund S. Morgan, Willie Lee Rose, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Kenneth M. Stampp, and C. Vann Woodward – c) 1981 - HBJ. NY
This is the fifth edition revised from the 1963 original. Of course, it is far closer in spirit to 1963 than it is to 1981. That's the problem with most revised edition general histories. They get the stamp of the latest revised year, but the old chapters have not very often been much “revised” at all. The producers just kept the work viable by adding new chapters, but the tenor of all the previous chapters retain all the bias and flavor of the initial copyright year. So this is a post-hippie era textbook written from the vantage point of the pre-hippie era.
Stampp is the all time hero for the history of Reconstruction.
Out of Many, A History of the American People, by John Mack Faragher (Yale); Mary Jo Buhle (Brown), Daniel Czitrom (Mount Holyoke); and Susan Armitage (Washington State), c)1994 – This is the Bible of PC outrageous liberal pseudo-history.
The Oxford History of the American People, by Samuel Eliot Morison – c) 1965 Oxford University Press
Although Morison is one of the bad guy historians (and a fine writer) in my book, he clearly does morally better in the Reconstruction period than he did in the events and trends leading up to the war. I've gone out my way to fry Morison and quote at him at length when he misbehaves, so its only fair to give him his due when he is on the ball,
“A fabulous theory about the war and reconstruction was built up in the South, as in Germany about World War I; and as Hitler used the Jews and the Allies as scapegoats, so the white South used Negroes and Republicans. The Reconstruction stereotype, already generally accepted in 1890, was promoted by David W. Griffith's film Birth of a Nation (1915) and reinforced by Margaret Mitchell's novel Gone With the Wind (1936). It has taken so strong a hold on the American mind, North as well as South, that it seems hopeless for a mere historian to deflate it.
The accepted fable represents reconstruction as the ruthless attempt of Northern politicians to subject the white South, starving and helpless, to an abominable rule by ex-slaves which, as the Bible says, is a thing the earth cannot bear, and from which it was rescued by white-hooded knights on horseback who put the Negro 'back where he belonged.'
One basic fact, ignored by the Griffith-Mitchell stereotype, is this: The white people of the former Confederacy were masters in their own states for a period of one to three years, when no compulsion was put upon them to enfranchise the Negro. During that period, when no Negro was allowed to vote, nothing was done to prepare him for responsible citizenship; on the contrary, the whites did everything conceivable to humiliate him and keep him down. In the South there were half a million free Negroes – mechanics, truck farmers, barbers, small business men, and the like; the literate third-generation free colored of New Orleans collectively owned property worth $15 million. These could have been used as a nucleus to educate the ex-slaves; but the white South would have none of that, or of them.”
On page 713 SEM finishes the slam dunk,
“The essential principle of the black codes, making the Negro a second-class citizen, is defiantly maintained by the white public of the lower South a century after the war ended.”
This book was published in 1965. The black codes of the fall of 1865 were still in operation while he typed. And if a Harvard redneck like Sam asserts it, you know its above argument.
The Racial Attitudes of American Presidents, by George Sinkler c) 1971
Reconstruction, America’s Unfinished Revolution, by Eric Foner of NYU - c) 1988
This is probably the best general history ever written of the Reconstruction era and problem. Foner is a great interview as well as scholar. He’s on C-span every now and then talking about his latest book. He’s naturally on speed. Foner’s lively mind has to slow down in order to write. A lot of bad historians are dullards who need to speed up their minds in order to write.
Reconstruction: The Great Experiment, by Allen W. Trelease - c) 1971
It's a short 204 pages and very readable. Al is a good writer. He is also from the Kenneth Stampp revisionist crowd, and good for him that he is. He tries to keep it neutral but his moral roots demand that he takes sides against the South, as much as he would like not to.
Reconstruction After the Civil War, by John Hope Franklin, c) 1961
Revisionist and infinitely readable work by an African-American academician. He explains the situation in the post-war South so very well,
“The Confederacy was beaten, but it refused to die. The spirit of the South and the principles underlying it were very much alive. More than that, those who had fought against the Union were in control, pursuing most of their prewar policies as though there had never been a war. This was reconstruction, Confederate style!”
“The complaints of many white Southerners that
the army of occupation was large and that
the many Negro troops were there for the
purpose of insulting and humiliating the former
Confederates were without justification. …
Recent historians who have spoken of the huge
military forces that were kept in the South after
the war have no basis for their assertions.”
He cites the Claude Bowers book (see below) as one that “did much to popularize the reconstruction period as a ‘travesty on honesty and on good government.’ He’s too kind. Bowers deserves worse analysis than that.
Reconstruction, The Great Experiment, by Allen W. Trelease, c) 1971 –
Al comes through with a modern revisionist defense of the old Rads that is pleasant to read. “Most Republicans – and especially the Radicals – were sincerely interested in the welfare of the Negro.” Thank you. Such a simple and obvious point but many books about the era fail to include it. They only talk about how the Republicans used the negro vote to control the South and with it the Congress and the White House.
A Short History of the American Nation, by John A. Garraty of Columbia – c) 1966 – c) 1977 (Fourth Revised and abridged) Harper& Row
When it comes to his attitude towards black in the Civil War years, he should spell his name 'garrotty.' I'm a minority of one on this guy. The University world considers him a giant beyond the reach of criticism, but hey, I spent 40 years as a comedian where subjectivity ruled. Anyone who didn't like my act had an infallible opinion. Now its time for me to dish it out too.
The Tragic Era, by Claude Bowers, c) 1929 Literary Guild of America
- The book is more tragic than the era he is writing about. Bowers is a disagreeable pro-South racist with his visceral venom spewing from the pages disguised cunningly as mature scholastic work. The Bowers thesis; every single thing that happened during Reconstruction was incredibly unfair to the South.
Bowers is always saying the that negroes were lazy. He moans about the situation in D.C. after the war;
“Never had there been so many idle men in the streets of the capital. … Of the thirty thousand negroes two thirds did not average a day’s work in a week. No matter – they could furnish a gallery audience for the play.”
There weren't a lot of jobs going around and they were overdue for a vacation, ... Claude.
The Record of America, by James Truslow Adams and Charles Garrett Vannest c) 1944 – Truslow is one of the giants of the history profession and to me he is a pro-Southern racist. His slant is subtle, but discernable and relentless. Page after page puts me in a rage. There’s not even an attempt at balance. Its just all bitter all the time. And no one ever calls him on it. I see historians cite his work all the time as though he is a historian to look up to. He’s a bum. I hate this guy. He’s a good writer and he’s an important part of the history of the history of our nation’s history.
If the current revisionism on the liberal side of things is the truth as I think it is, then there can be no excusing the following segment on Reconstruction. And remember, style is substance.
THE NORTH CLAIMS THE SOUTH IS TRYING TO SET ASIDE EMANCIPATION
… Owing to the Overwhelming proportion of whites to negroes in the North there was no Northern Negro
problem. Even so, in only six Northern states was a Negro permitted to vote.
After peace came, there was economic chaos for a while in the South. The Negro, with false ideas of what freedom meant, was not inclined to work but much inclined to wander. For his own good, until he had learned to adjust himself to the new conditions of being his own master, with the responsibility.
The United States: The History of a Republic, by Richard Hofstadter (Columbia University), William Miller (Quigley College), and Daniel Aaron (Smith College) – c) 1957
This classy classic schoolbook hardcover passes the lunch test. You can open it flat and eat your lunch with two hands and still read it. I hate hardcovers that won't open up flat.
FILM
Tennessee Johnson – A movie starring Van Heflin as TJ – Really infuriating fiction masquerading as a history movie. It's better to just take it as pure fiction than to try to learn from it. Like so much of Hollywoods' historical works, its anti-educational, filling the viewer with false information, making the person walk out of the theater worse than ignorant. Its better to know nothing than to be sure of untruths.
The movie makes the Radical Republicans the personification of evil. It also patronizes women by making him far more ignorant and illiterate than he ever really was, and making his wife his mentor far more than she ever really was. You can make that solid point of her tutelage without making us cringe.
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