THE CENTURY’S AFTER-THE-WAR SERIES
THE CENTURY’S AFTER-THE-WAR SERIES
INTRODUCTION
No period of our history better repays perusal by thoughtful readers and good citizens than the political happenings of the three years following the Civil War, culminating in the attempt to “recall” President Johnson. But the subject is so vast that no magazine article can more than suggest its outlines, or sketch the personalities involved in the first efforts to reëstablish civil order in the South.
Probably no actor in that series of passionate events could write of them without some bias; nor would any picture be quite true without the perspective due to individual experience.
Considered in the large, the long fight between Congress and President Johnson must be regarded as a wrestling of political forces, a struggle for major influence in reconstruction, between the executive and legislative branches of the Government.
In the Civil War the Democratic party, which for many years had been dominated by the slave-holding interests of the South, had been dethroned by the new Republican party, which, however, could not have achieved its purpose to save the Union and abolish slavery without the aid of the large body of War Democrats who had been rallied to the support of Lincoln by his defeated rival, Senator Douglas.
At the end of the war, the Republican party was dominated by its Radical wing, whose extreme aims were almost as offensive to the War Democrats as to their old allies of the South; and the latter were not slow to grasp at the political advantage of a reunion which promised Democratic control of the National Government.
A fourth great factor in the war had been the Union men of the South, formerly Democrats, of whom Andrew Johnson had been the forceful leader. It was this prominence which dictated his nomination for Vice-President in 1864. When, at the close of the war, by the assassination of Lincoln he became President, his utterances gave the Republicans hope that as a convert his zeal would equal if not exceed that of the Radicals in their purpose to subject the South to a period of political probation. But it was soon manifest that he would steer the course of conciliation which Lincoln, before the end of battle, had already charted and begun. The tendency of Johnson’s policy was to draw to him men imbued with the old Democratic sentiment. In a little while, the Republican leaders perceived that as soon as the Democrats of the South should be allowed to vote they would unite with the Democrats of the North, and thus Republican ascendancy might come to a sudden end, and some of the results achieved by battle might be reversed at the ballot-box.
The black man had been freed, and, to protect him against the political power of his former masters, the Republicans decided to give him the ballot. This, it was expected, would also offset Democratic votes in the South, and help to perpetuate Republican rule. President Johnson had championed emancipation, but was opposed to immediate Negro suffrage. In the minds of the Radicals that attitude not only stamped him as a traitor to the party which elected him, but also incited an obstinate South. When the efforts to thwart the President by obstructive laws had failed, the Radicals sought to remove him by impeachment.
Each side had abundant legal and moral grounds for its actions, and each believed that the other was reaching for selfish political advantage. Outbreaks of lawlessness in the South, peculiar to the extraordinary conditions, and chargeable to both sides, convinced each that its worst fears were justified.
In the pages which follow, the main motives for impeachment are sketched by General Otis, who fought through the Civil War as a Union soldier, then entered the long political contest as a militant journalist, and finally resumed his place by the flag in the war with Spain. A more conservative view is taken by General Henderson, a War Democrat high in Lincoln’s confidence, and a slaveholder who yet proposed the final edict of freedom in the Senate. He is the only survivor of the seven Republican senators who thwarted impeachment, ex-Senator George F. Edmunds, of Vermont, being the only other surviving member of the court. Out of his personal recollection General Henderson describes his intercourse with Lincoln in securing emancipation, and his part in the impeachment fiasco.
Papers to follow, in the January CENTURY, will include an account of the impeachment trial, largely based on the President’s notes and letters, and an anecdotal sketch of Andrew Johnson, one of the most peculiar characters in American history.
In subsequent papers, after an interval, the later aspects of “Reconstruction” will be treated from the Southern point of view.—THEEDITOR.