Flashback, June 1866: Trying to Win Justice and Peace Through Reconstruction

The struggle between North and South did not end at Appomattox. Instead, it switched decisively, in June 1866, from massed armies maneuvering around natural boundaries to the halls of Washington, where Congress tried to outflank a Southern-born President in order to defend the rights of recently emancipated slaves.

In mid-1866, like now, the House and Senate were dominated by Republicans, and the meaning of loyalty filled the political discourse. But back then, unlike now, an activist majority tried to ensure and extend the rights of citizenship, as Congress used its not-inconsiderable powers of investigation and legislation to advance its agenda.

But Andrew Johnson proved that a carefully crafted House and Senate strategy can by stymied by an obstructionist President—even a politically maladroit, unpopular one.

This past weekend, I saw The Free State of Jones, a film with most unusual subject matter: not just the “secession within secession” staged by poor whites in the Civil War, but also their abortive alliance with freedmen in the decade after the guns ceased firing. 

Most remarkable is its attempt to address America’s Reconstruction period—an era three times as long, by a conservative estimate, as the war itself, but only covered, to any significant degree, by three major Hollywood releases: Birth of a Nation, Gone With the Wind, and The Outlaw Josey Whales; a now all-but-forgotten feature about the President at the heart of it, Tennessee Johnson; and, on TV, the mini-series Roots II and a 1979 TV movie adaptation of Howard Fast’s novel, Freedom Road, starring Muhammad Ali, in a rare acting role. It’s a dismal commentary that the first three productions, the most widely seen, are also the most fundamentally inaccurate. (I considered the outsize role of Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind in shaping Americans’ attitudes to this era in this prior post.)

It is less likely that Hollywood has developed a sudden interest in this dimly-understood era than that a star’s box-office clout has carried the day. Matthew McConaghey did not always possess the kind of leverage to launch a historical film: some years ago, I recall one of my instructors at a summer writing program discussing how a screenplay about the early 19^th-century Native American warrior Red Eagle had vanished with McConaghey’s name attached to the project because of the subpar box-office performance of Mel Gibson’s The Patriot. 

All power to the star of Dallas Buyers Club and True Detective, then, for committing his prestige to The Free State of Jones and shining a light on a period that has been all too often distorted—not just in cinemas but, far less understandably, the groves of academe for much of the early 20th century. 

Although the movie sags slightly in the middle and could have recruited an African-American with similar star power as McConaghey, it manages to spotlight, economically, a host of events involving the Civil War and Reconstruction in the Deep South: fierce dissent in pockets of the Confederacy, the education of freedmen, the “Black Codes” in the immediate postwar period that sought to place them in de facto slavery, their rising voting-rights activity, and the domestic terrorism practiced by the Ku Klux Klan. (A full consideration of the film can be found on this post by Prof. Michael Steudeman from the University of Memphis, from the "Rhetoric, Race and Religion" blog.)

By the end of 1865, conditions in the defeated South were every bit as dark and desolate as depicted in the film, probably even more so. An entire economic and social order built on slavery had collapsed. On the one hand, defeated secessionists desired readmission to the Union on essentially the status quo basis that existed before the Civil War. At the same time, unable to vent their anger over losing on the Northern victors, they turned on freedmen and unionist poor whites who were far more vulnerable.

At first, Congressional Republicans had yielded the initiative on Reconstruction to Johnson, certain that, as a Southerner who had, against all odds, sided with the Union, he would deal with former Confederates far more harshly than Abraham Lincoln. To their astonishment, he had far more sympathy with Southern whites, even those who had risen in rebellion, than with freedmen. 

After months of watching the President fail to protect African-Americans or Union loyalists in the South, the House of Representatives and Senate agreed to form the Joint Committee on Reconstruction to "inquire into the condition of the States which formed the so-called Confederate States of America, and report whether they, or any of them, are entitled to be represented in either house of Congress.” 

Over the next several months, nearly 150 witnesses would be called, including one who would have been familiar to many members from his past service in the House, the former Vice-President of the Confederacy, Alexander H. Stephens. Unbelievably, he argued that Southerners’ views on “constitutional liberties” had not changed after the war, and that included even the “abstract principle” of secession. They expected that “immediately the states would be brought back into their practical relations with the government as previously constituted,” so that they could “look to the arena of reason and justice for the protection of their rights in the Union.”

“Their” rights meant those of the former Confederates. As for the freedmen, Stephens felt that the South “would be unwilling to do more than they have done for restoration.”

This kind of attitude didn’t sit well with the Joint Committee. The views of its 15 members could not be said to be even remotely bipartisan—only one senator and two congressmen were Democrats—but now, Southern intransigence, combined with abundant testimony about the retribution visited upon freedmen and Unionist whites, propelled more conservative Republicans such as Committee Chairman William Pitt Fessenden to ally with the so-called “Radical Republicans,” led by Rep. Thaddeus Stevens (pictured). 

Deeply provoked, the Joint Committee, in its report issued June 20, 1866, warned, in language that Southerners would have found punitive but that Northerners saw as only just, that the federal government “had a perfect right to exact indemnity for the injuries done” in the Civil War, and that, far from being states, the former units of the Confederacy had, by the conflict’s end, been reduced to “disorganized communities” without civil governments, constitutions or “established and recognized rules,” and thus that Congress was not obliged to respect any rights they claimed. 

The former Confederate states could only resume their place in the government, the Joint Committee concluded, by guaranteeing the rights of the freedmen and excluding Confederate officials. For readmission to Congress, they needed to ensure “such constitutional or other guarantees as will tend to secure the civil rights of all citizens of the republic; a just equality of representation; protection against claims founded in rebellion and crime; a temporary restoration of the right of suffrage to those who had not actively participated in the efforts to destroy the Union and overthrow the government, and the exclusion from positions of public trust of, at least, a portion of those whose crimes have proved them to be enemies to the Union, and unworthy of public confidence.” 

None of the above remedies mentioned economic solutions for the freedmen. The one conceived of by the Radical Republicans, land grants, was born of one of their landmark measures passed during the Civil War, the Homestead Act of 1862. But the Southern Homestead Act, passed on June 21, 1866, demonstrated the limits of even relatively well-intentioned legislation.

The legislation opened up 46 million acres of public domain land in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, and Mississippi. In an attempt to ensure that freedmen and loyal whites would have a first opportunity at the land, Congress instituted a six-month later starting date for former Confederates. But the legislation missed the goal of real land reform, for several reasons:

*Often, many freedmen could not capitalize on the six-month window because of labor contracts that ran through January 1867.  Additional problems were encountered in Louisiana because of severe flooding and closed land offices.

*Rather than awarding land from subdivided plantations confiscated from their Confederate owners, Congress designated public land that was poor in quality and hard to till.

*Because much of the public land was given over to timber, fraud and racial intimidation were rampant, trespassing and homestead entries by people who did not intend to farm the lands.

*Many freedmen had no means to travel to these newly opened lands, which were not only far away from where the claim were filed but also in either the Deep South or over the Appalachians. Even when ordered to assist them, Army troops were inconsistent in doing so.

*Many freedmen did not even own enough capital to buy equipment for tilling the land.

*Though accused of vengefulness, many Republicans, even a number of Radicals, would not go along with the idea of seizing the only abundant, fertile land: massive plantations of former slaveowners.

*The idea of the federal government granting freedmen additional favors ran against the grain of both mainstream Protestants with their belief in earthly rewards coming through hard work and against the Republican Party base, which believed in a free-soil ideology with as much appeal to racists who feared black labor as to abolitionists.

As a result, Congress repealed the Southern Homestead Act only 10 years after passage.

The Free State of Jones rightly spotlights the shriveled promise of the Fifteenth Amendment to ensure voting rights for African-Americans. But in June 1866, the Radical Republicans managed to pass another so-called “Reconstruction Amendment,” the Fourteenth Amendment. Like the Fifteenth, it did not produce what it originally promised, but it ended up becoming perhaps the most important and controversial of the post-Bill of Rights amendments to the Constitution.

The amendment, particularly in the first section, was worded broadly, even vaguely—an intention of its creators, to allow as much flexibility as possible in case of further incursions on the rights of freedmen. The crucial portion of this amendment was Section 1, with such hotly debated clauses as the “privileges and immunities” of citizens, “due process,” and “equal protection of the law.”

The amendment had its drawbacks (e.g., by extending rights explicitly to males, it fractured the coalition of women and African-Americans that had been so important in the abolitionist movement). The ambiguity of its language also allowed judges in the Gilded Age and early Progressive Era to consider corporations as “persons” while bypassing the African-Americans who were the legislation’s intended beneficiaries. 

But beginning in the 1930s, judges began to apply the amendment in more and more civil-rights cases—and, with greater explicitness than before, it defined citizenship as a matter of birthright.
(It was this aspect of the amendment to which Donald Trump took such heinous exception.) Just as important, through the "due process" clause, the "incorporation doctrine" evolved so that rights spelled out by the federal government began to be applied to states as well.

This Day in American History (House of Representatives Impeaches Andrew Johnson)

February 24, 1868—By a straight party-line vote of 126 to 47, Republican-dominated House of Representatives impeached President Andrew Johnson. Several months later, in the Senate, he escaped conviction and removal from office by a single vote.

Public perceptions of the impeachment of Johnson have changed, then changed again, over the years, in a fascinating case study of historiography. In the years immediately after the event, the President and his defenders were vilified in the North.

In the first half of the 20th century, a number of historians, following the lead of Columbia University professors William Dunning and John W. Burgess, depicted Reconstruction as an era marked by corruption and Radical Republican vengeance. They viewed Andrew Johnson as at worst an imperfect upholder of the Constitution and at best a man of courage.

Starting in the mid-1950s and the civil rights movement, however, a more complicated picture emerged. 

Kenneth Stampp, James McPherson, David Herbert Donald, John Hope Franklin, Eric McKitrick and Eric Foner (the last two in the same Columbia history department as Dunning) pursued the lead of African-American historian W.E.B. DuBois’s Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 (minus the Marxist-influenced ideology) in showing this era as a lost opportunity for American racial and social progress. 

These “revisionists” see President Johnson as deeply racist and his adversaries as more moderate than that loaded term “Radical Republican” would suggest.

The events leading up to the impeachment votes bolster the argument for the last viewpoint.

Johnson, a lifelong Democrat, was nominated by Republicans as Abraham Lincoln’s running mate in the 1864 election as a way to win the votes of Union Democrats (including those from Southern border states) that year. 

Lincoln’s assassination, then, put in the White House a man largely out of sympathy with the party that controlled Congress.

The Dunning school of thought on Reconstruction posited that Johnson was merely following his predecessor’s lenient Reconstruction policy. They ignore, however, both Lincoln’s political suppleness and the evolution of his policies. 

Unlike Johnson, Lincoln was a master of men, a politician with a highly attuned sense for exactly what was politically possible. If anyone could have reconciled Southerners and Radical Republicans, it was he.

But there was a limit to how much even this man who called for “malice for none and charity for all” would accept. 

In Abraham Lincoln: Man Behind the Myths, Stephen B. Oates takes issue with the idea that Lincoln would have been accommodating to the South. In fact, he shows how, on issue after issue (notably that of compensation for slaves), the South’s stubbornness pushed him increasingly toward progressive, pro-freedmen policies.

Though initially interested in indicting leading Confederates (especially the Southern aristocrats that he blamed for starting the war) for treason, Johnson soon parted ways with the Republicans over using government to promote economic development and over greater political and economic opportunity for freed slaves.

At every turn, Johnson used his office to circumvent the will of Congress: by appointing conservative generals to administer Southern military districts, by giving civilian governments the authority to control voter registration and election of convention delegates, and to obstruct any role for freedmen in the new Southern governments.

Johnson’s personal failings didn’t help. His intoxication during his inaugural address as Vice-President (Lincoln kept his eyes shut throughout the painful ordeal, then rose to his feet to deliver his immortal Second Inaugural Address) enabled detractors to depict him (wrongly) as a habitual drunkard. 

His customary intransigence and public belligerence toward opponents – even, on Washington’s birthday in 1866, accusing Congress of trying to assassinate him and starting a second rebellion—unnecessarily alienated many.

The showdown between President and Congress came over the Tenure of Office Act, which provided that all officials confirmed by the Senate could only be removed with that body’s approval. 

Johnson sought to remove Secretary of War Edwin Stanton for defiantly claiming in a Cabinet meeting that military governors in the South were answerable to Congress, not to the President.

At first, Johnson sought to fire Stanton by offering his post to General Ulysses S. Grant. The Union hero, having his own disagreements with the President on Reconstruction, wouldn’t take the bait. 

A long, painful search for a successor then led the President to General Lorenzo Thomas, who made the mistake of acceding to Stanton’s wish for “time for reflection.”

Bolstered by a one-word message from Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner—“Stick”—Stanton proceeded to barricade himself in his office! For a second time, Johnson removed him. 

A day later, on February 22, the spokesman for the powerful House Reconstruction Committee, Thaddeus Stevens, drafted 11 counts of impeachment—two dealing with Johnson’s indecorous behavior toward Congress, the others with the Tenure of Office Act.

(Particularly in the early 20th century, when he was caricatured as “Austin Stoneman,” the wild-eyed Congressman in D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, Stevens came in for harsh criticism. His constitutional case against Johnson was not the strongest, but this passionate supporter of civil rights long before it was fashionable deserves better than his caricature, and is finally getting his due from historians.

Though nearly all his correspondence with his household “servant” no longer survives, the few letters that do strongly suggest that the two were an interracial couple involved in a common-law marriage. When Stevens died, not long after the impeachment proceedings, he insisted on being buried in the only cemetery in his area that allowed for internment of blacks and whites together, so he could be next to the woman he loved.)

Partly because the coming trial had such important implications for the later impeachment proceedings against Nixon and Clinton, and partly because the trial was such a fascinating spectacle in itself, I will be returning to the story of Johnson’s impeachment at a later point.

Suffice it to say for now that his prospects for acquittal were enhanced immeasurably by his legal team’s insistence that he stay silent and not even attend the proceedings – his mere presence might have tipped the balance decisively against him.

Johnson, like all Presidents, had the responsibility to ensure that laws be “faithfully executed.” The Radical Republicans surely overreached with impeachment charges based on the Tenure of Office Act, but Johnson just as surely failed in his constitutional responsibility to ensure that the laws be “faithfully executed.”