Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen Guelzo (self help books to read TXT) 📕

to recognize them. The House Radicals, with Thaddeus Stevens in the lead, then seized the initiative by referring the entire matter of Reconstruction to a joint House-Senate Committee on Reconstruction (which would be, for all practical purposes, a reincarnation of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War), thus grabbing the oversight of Reconstruction out of Johnson’s hands, as Ben Wade and Henry Winter Davis had tried to do in 1864. In the Senate, Wade and Sumner were ready with a bill for black voting rights in the District of Columbia and resolutions banning the readmittance to the Union of any state that did not also endorse equal voting rights for all adult males, regardless of color. “I deny the right of these States to pass these laws against men who are citizens of the United States,” spluttered Henry Wilson, and he was seconded by Lyman Trumbull of Illinois, who introduced a federal civil rights bill just after the New Year that contained a forthright definition of federal citizenship, based on jus soli: “All persons born in the United States … are hereby declared to be citizens of the United States,” declared the new bill, “and such citizens, of every race and color … shall have the same right, in every State and Territory in the United States … as is enjoyed by white citizens.”60

But Wilson and Trumbull were soon to learn that Reconstruction was no easier to accomplish in Congress than in the White House. Wilson was promptly interrupted by John Sherman of Ohio, who pointed out that “there is scarcely a State in the Union that does not make distinctions on account of color. … Is it the purpose of this bill to wipe out all these distinctions?” And in the House of Representatives, Wisconsin Democrat Charles Eldridge accused the promoters of the civil rights legislation of an “insidious and dangerous” plan to “lay prostrate at the feet of the Federal Government the judiciary of the States.” The only citizenship Eldridge knew was the citizenship of the states: “I hold that the rights of the States are the rights of the Union, and that the rights of the States and the liberty of the States are essential to the liberty of the individual citizen.” Garret Davis of Kentucky called the bill “a bald, naked attempt to usurp power and to bring all the sovereign and reserved powers of the States to the foot of a tyrannical and despotic faction in Congress,” crying that it gave the vote “to a race of men who throughout their whole history, in every country and condition in which they have ever been placed, have demonstrated their utter inability for self-government.”61

This was deliberately seeing ghosts for bedsheets. The Radicals were driven by neither a demonic thirst for centralized government nor an idealized passion for racial egalitarianism. “This doctrine does not mean that a negro shall sit on the same seat or eat at the same table with a white man,” Thaddeus Stevens replied in 1867. “That is a matter of taste which every man must decide for himself. The law has nothing to do with it.” But insofar as the black man born in the United States and the white man born in the United States were considered politically, their identity was based not on being black or white but on being citizens. “We will have no permanent settlement of the negro question,” warned the New York editor Theodore Tilton, “till our haughtier white blood, looking the negro in the face, shall forget that he is black, and remember only that he is a citizen.”62

The stage was now set for a direct confrontation between the president and the Radical wing of what was supposed to be his own party. The Radicals began by setting out once again their version of Reconstruction’s primary question: that secession was tantamount to state suicide, that the former Southern states were now in the position of territories, and that the Constitution clearly placed territories under the oversight of Congress. “Congress alone is authorized to deal with the subject of reconstruction,” wrote one Radical congressman to Charles Sumner, and that grant of authority included an unprecedented level of intervention in local Southern affairs, just as it would in any Federal territory. That included the requirement of black voting rights and land reform: “Our safety and the peace of the country require us to disenfranchise the rebels and to enfranchise the colored citizens in the revolted states and thereby confide the political power therein to … safe hands.” This led the Radicals to push not only for the civil rights bill but also for renewal of the Freedmen’s Bureau (since the Bureau would be given much of the responsibility as a federal watchdog for violations of the civil rights bill) and confirmation of Sherman’s forty-acre order.63

Johnson interpreted these actions as an assault on his presidential authority as well as on his old Democratic deference to state and local power—which is precisely what they were. But unlike Lincoln, who had defused attacks like these by moving softly around them, Johnson hurled the full force of his anger at the Radicals. On February 7 Johnson received a delegation of African American leaders, headed by Frederick Douglass, and proceeded to harangue them on the impossibility of granting political equality to blacks. When Douglass tried to object, Johnson cut him short: “I do not like to be arraigned by some who can get up handsomely-rounded periods and deal in rhetoric, and talk about abstract ideas of liberty, who never periled life, liberty, or property.” Douglass took his objections out the door with him and published them in a Washington newspaper. “I know that d——d Douglass,” screeched Johnson when he read Douglass’s comments; “he’s just like any nigger, & he would sooner cut a white man’s throat than not.”64

Having turned from playing Moses to playing Pharaoh, Johnson struck back at Congress. On February 19 he vetoed the Freedmen’s Bureau renewal bill, arguing that Congress