This Great Struggle (61 page)

CONGRESS ASCENDANT

Johnson continued to fight Reconstruction tooth and nail, interpreting the laws in such a way as to negate most of their intended effect. Early in 1867 Republicans considered trying to impeach him but found that they were not unified on the question of whether to take such an extreme step. Yet as Johnson continued his obstinate resistance to everything the Republicans tried to do, support for impeachment steadily rose. In August Johnson took the opportunity of the Senate’s adjournment to dismiss Stanton, at least pending the Senate’s reconvening. As interim secretary of war Johnson appointed Grant, who accepted the job only in order to try to protect the army from more of Johnson’s efforts to hamstring it and its mission of Reconstruction. Despite his best efforts, however, Grant was unable to stop Johnson from relieving Sheridan as military governor of Texas and Louisiana and assigning in his place a general more amenable to the maintenance of white supremacy in those states. Johnson’s efforts encouraged white southerners to stand fast against the ratification of the new state constitutions or any move toward the acceptance of black suffrage or civil rights.

In December 1867 the Senate reconvened and the following month voted to disapprove Johnson’s removal of Stanton as secretary of war. In obedience to the Tenure of Office Act, Grant vacated the office, and Stanton resumed his old duties. On February 21 Johnson openly defied the act by firing Stanton again and appointing the army’s adjutant general, Lorenzo Thomas, as interim replacement. This was a blatant violation of law, and the House of Representatives reacted by impeaching Johnson three days later.

The Constitution provides that an official impeached by the House should then be tried by the Senate and, if found guilty, removed from office. Impeachment by the House is analogous to indictment by a grand jury in a criminal case, and the Senate stands in the place of the trial court. Johnson’s trial in the Senate began on March 4, 1868, eight days after his impeachment by the House. Johnson’s team of very skillful defense lawyers argued that since violation of the Tenure of Office Act was not a crime for which an ordinary citizen could be indicted, it was not impeachable either. They further argued that Johnson was merely trying to have the constitutionality of the act tested by the Supreme Court and that in any case the act did not apply to him in Stanton’s case since Stanton had been appointed by Lincoln, not Johnson.

Of more practical aid to Johnson’s case was the discomfort some moderate Republicans in the Senate felt about the process. Removal of a president seemed disturbingly radical. Worse, if Johnson were removed, the notorious longtime abolitionist and Radical Speaker of the House Benjamin Wade was in line to become president. Some of the moderate Republicans quietly reached out to Johnson through intermediaries to suggest that perhaps it might not be necessary to impeach him if he would show some restraint. For once, Johnson took a hint. He stopped making incendiary speeches and started enforcing the Reconstruction acts. When the roll call vote was taken on Johnson’s removal from office, the tally was thirty-five yea and nineteen nay. The shift of a single senator’s vote would have been enough remove Johnson from office. As it was, seven Republican senators had voted to acquit, joined by the Senate’s twelve Democrats.

Over the course of the next several months, one southern state after another adopted the necessary state constitution abjuring slavery and embracing black suffrage and ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, fulfilling the terms of the Military Reconstruction Act so as once again to have senators and representatives accepted in Congress. By the end of 1868, seven former Confederate states had been readmitted to representation in Congress. Despite the setback they had suffered in failing to remove Johnson from office, the Congressional Republicans had scored a major success in their program of Reconstruction.

Many white southerners had fought the process with all their might and would continue to do so. Employers and landowners tried to intimidate their black employees or tenants into staying away from the polls. Some whites organized themselves into night-riding organizations to carry out murders, beatings, and other acts of terror against blacks and their white allies. Chief among these night-riding organizations was the Ku Klux Klan.

Founded in 1865 in Pulaski, Tennessee, by bored former Confederate soldiers, the Klan was initially a relatively innocuous fraternal organization. By 1868, however, it had become a terrorist organization, frequently murdering politically active blacks, as well as Scalawags and Carpetbaggers, as the opponents of civil rights referred to southern Unionists and northern settlers in the South, respectively. Additional Klan targets included freedmen’s schools and their teachers along with any “uppity” blacks. Klansmen dressed in a variety of outlandish costumes, often featuring robes (frequently but not always white) and white, conical hats or hoods. Too cowardly to own up to their deeds, they generally covered their faces with masks. At the head of the Klan was its “Grand Wizard,” former Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest. Local Klan chapters acted more or less independently, with the Grand Wizard serving mainly as an inspirational figure. As the election of 1868 approached, Forrest publicly announced that if the authorities attempted to use the militia to prevent the Klan from suppressing Republican voting in Memphis, his men would murder every Republican political leader in the city.

THE GRANT ADMINISTRATION

As the 1868 election campaign got under way, the Republicans nominated Grant for president. The Democrats passed over Andrew Johnson, who had hoped for their endorsement. Instead the party gave its nomination to Horatio Seymour. New York’s wartime Copperhead governor, Seymour had referred to the New York rioters of 1863 as “my friends.” The Democratic campaign appealed strongly to racism, demanding that the government should remain strictly a white man’s concern. The night riders went all out, committing more than two hundred murders in the state of Arkansas alone, including the killing of a U.S. congressman. Georgia saw somewhat fewer murders but more beatings. Louisiana, on the other hand, saw not only numerous assassinations but at least three anti-Republican riots and had a total death toll well over one thousand. The intimidation worked, and tens of thousands of southern blacks stayed away from the polls, allowing the Democrats to carry several southern states despite majorities of black voters in those states. In the North, however, Grant ran as well as Lincoln had in 1864, carrying almost exactly the same states and localities for a total of 214 electoral votes to Seymour’s 80. The Republicans retained dominant majorities in both houses of Congress.

One of the first goals of Congress after the election was the passage of yet another constitutional amendment, the third of three amendments known as the Reconstruction Amendments and the fifteenth overall. This one stipulated that the right to vote was not to be denied by any state on the account of race. It was much needed in the North as well as the South since eleven of the twenty-one northern states still did not permit black suffrage, and referenda allowing suffrage had gone down to defeat in a number of northern states since the war. Congress approved the amendment in February 1869. All across the North, Republican-controlled legislatures ratified it, and Democratic ones rejected it. Four southern states—Virginia, Georgia, Mississippi, and Texas—had still not been readmitted to representation in Congress, so Congress required them to ratify both the Fourteenth and the Fifteenth amendments in order to regain their seats in the national legislature. All four states did so and were restored to representation in 1870. That same year the Fifteenth Amendment became part of the Constitution.

Grant has gone down in history, unfairly, as one of the nation’s worst presidents. In truth, he was not as good a president as he was a general. He had been a master of the political nuances of wartime generalship, but he was less skillful in coping with the far different set of political problems generated by life in the White House at the very center of the political cauldron that was Washington, D.C. He had been an exceptionally good judge of the character and ability of officers with whom he served closely in wartime, and he had prospered as a general in part by surrounding himself with a team of such trusty subordinates. Yet even during the war he was far less effective in judging the traits of generals with whom he merely held interviews, as his experience with Butler and Meade demonstrated.

As president, Grant was sometimes sadly lacking in the ability to judge which men would be trustworthy in the turbid waters of Washington politics or New York high finance. Scrupulously honest himself, Grant tended to trust those around him. When he misjudged men who were not worthy of his trust, the result could be costly, as when Secretary of the Interior (and former general) William W. Belknap betrayed Grant’s trust by engaging in corruption or when financiers Jay Gould and Jim Fisk misused indirect connections to Grant in order to promote their attempt to corner the market on gold, leading to the Black Friday crash. Grant was free of wrongdoing in both affairs.

Some of the opprobrium heaped on Grant’s administration for its supposed corruption actually involved the administration’s exposure and cleanup of graft that had been carried out under the previous administration. Such was the case of the Creédit Mobilier scandal of 1872. The United States had completed its first transcontinental railroad in 1869, along the general route that Stephen A. Douglas had envisioned a decade and a half before. Douglas’s efforts to pave the way politically for such a railroad had resulted in the Kansas-Nebraska Act back in 1854 and had moved the nation another large step closer to civil war. As Douglas and virtually everyone else at that time had assumed was necessary, the railroad had been built with hefty subsidies from the federal government. Unfortunately, government money attracts corruption the way a carcass draws flies, and the transcontinental railroad was no exception. The builders of the railroad set up a dummy company called Creédit Mobilier and used it to skim millions of dollars in excess construction costs from the government, generously bribing members of Congress to grease the wheels along the way. Grant’s administration exposed and cleaned up the mess, but, partially thanks to hostile Democratic newspapers, the public associated the scandal with Grant.

Grant’s administration pressed the issue of Britain’s responsibility for the financial losses caused by raiding vessels such as the CSS
Alabama
and other instances of tacit—or at least negligent—support of the Confederacy. Some in Congress, notably Senator Charles Sumner, believed that Canada would be about the right compensation. After several years of tense negotiations, American diplomats persuaded Britain to accept a treaty submitting the disputed claims to international arbitration. The three arbitrating countries—Switzerland, Italy, and Brazil—ruled unanimously in favor of the United States, awarding $15.5 million in damages. Great Britain paid the claims, opening the way for a period of steadily improving Anglo-American relations that would have important consequences in the twentieth century.

The depredations of the Ku Klux Klan continued apace, and Republican state governments in the South proved unable to suppress the terrorist organization. Congress and the Grant administration set out to take the matter in hand in 1870, passing and enforcing an act making it a federal offense to interfere with voting rights. When this measure proved too weak to break the Klan, Congress in 1872 added a second enforcing act, known as the Ku Klux Klan Act, strengthening the provisions of the first act and authorizing the president to deploy the army and to suspend the writ of habeas corpus when and where necessary. Grant sent troops to the South, and over the next few months his administration made thousands of arrests and secured hundreds of convictions. Other Klansmen fled the country to escape arrest. The campaign broke the power of the Klan, which officially disbanded. However, other similar night-riding organizations, such as the Red Shirts, continued to terrorize blacks and other southern Republicans in their relentless quest to rid the South of any taint of black equality or civil rights.

In 1872 the Republicans nominated Grant for a second term. The main issue of the campaign was Grant’s “bayonet rule” in the South and his supposedly cruel and tyrannical suppression of the Ku Klux Klan. A different twist was added when members of Grant’s own Republican Party took up the accusation, splitting from the rest of the party and calling themselves the Liberal Republican Party. They were an odd conglomeration of men with personal grudges against Grant, idealistic nineteenth-century liberals (something like what would be called libertarians in the twenty-first century), and people who had simply become tired of the effort to suppress southern terrorism and just wanted to move on.

As their presidential candidate the Liberal Republicans nominated the always unstable but tremendously well-known newspaper editor Horace Greeley. Their platform called for the reduction or removal of protective tariffs, a blanket amnesty for all former Rebels, repentant or not, and an end to the army’s protection of civil rights in the South. The Democrats knew a good thing when they saw it and added their endorsement to Greeley’s Liberal Republican nomination. However formidable the alliance of Democrats with a splinter faction of the Republican Party may have seemed at the outset, it proved less so in the actual campaign. When election day came, Grant won reelection in one of the most impressive landslides since the days of Andrew Jackson.

THE ELECTION OF 1876 AND THE END OF RECONSTRUCTION

Throughout the years of Reconstruction, the majority of white southerners never accepted the legitimacy of the changes the Civil War had brought, and many of them kept up a constant struggle to extinguish black political activity and black civil rights and to reestablish white supremacy in their states. Democratic Party politics made up one arm of this effort, and night-riding terrorism was the other. As long as the North retained the political will to enforce the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments and to protect blacks and white Republicans in the South, the efforts of the white supremacists proved mostly in vain.