The Tenth Decade of the United States

VI. THE THIRTY-NINTH CONGRESS

ON the first Monday in December, 1865, as Senators and Representatives took their seats for the first session of the Thirty-Ninth Congress, they must have felt that a gulf divided it from all its predecessors. The nation had come safely through a fearful passage, but for the future the old charts would not serve. The new legislature could not gather from the experience of earlier congresses precedents to guide it in the extraordinary work it had to do. To ascertain its own powers, it could not turn to any clear pronouncements of the courts, but must go back to the Constitution; and the applicability of the texts it found there was doubtful — so doubtful that no shrewd observer of the human nature of legislative bodies would look to see mere constitutional scruples prevail in the long run against any strong prompting of expediency, against party passion, against the universal tendency of lawmakers to assert all the powers to which they can lay any reasonable claim.

It was a strong congress, on the whole. In a letter to the Duchess of Argyle, Sumner said of the House of Representatives: “In my opinion, it is the best that ever has been since the beginning of the government. It is full of talent and is governed by patriotic purpose.” Of talent, indeed, there was no lack in either chamber. Besides the names on the rolls that were already famous, one is struck with the number of new names that were to remain for years in the public eye. The House was unusually strong in young blood. Out of some two hundred members who took their seats on the opening day, a score or more were soon to pass down the long corridor to the quieter and more distinguished chamber at the other end of the Capitol; others were to sit in the cabinets of future presidents; two members of the same state delegation were to occupy the White House in succession. Two particularly brilliant young members, Roscoe Conkling of New York and James G. Blaine of Maine, already, perhaps, rivals in their own minds for the succession to the leadership of their party in the House, found during the session excellent chances to display their gifts in oratory and their skill in the management of men. Before the adjournment, their rivalry broke into a memorable quarrel. Members who had risen or were rising to prominence by the ordinary course of promotion for competent attention to the business of the House were Morrill of Vermont, Boutwell and Dawes of Massachusetts, Jenckes of Rhode Island, Randall and Kelley of Pennsylvania, Bingham and Shellabarger of Ohio, Voorhees of Indiana, Washburne and Cullom of Illinois, Allison and Wilson of Iowa. Of the new members, Henry J. Raymond, editor of the New York Times, Greeley’s rival, friend and follower of Seward, seemed the most likely to step at once into leadership by virtue of a reputation elsewhere acquired, and thus break the tradition that influence in the House can be won only by services rendered within its walls. From the various armies came a group of men who now, however well they had proved their metal in soldiership, turned to politics as to their true vocation. Massachusetts sent back Banks, who, before he became a soldier had been congressman, Speaker, and governor of his state. Ohio alone sent three generals — Hayes, Schenck, and Garfield. All things considered, Ohio’s was the strongest delegation on the floor. The West had for some years been steadily gaining ground in national politics, and now bade fair to win an ascendency at Washington comparable to that the South had maintained there for half a century before its representatives departed to set up a government of their own.

Hardly less noticeable was the lack of conspicuous ability in the narrow section of the chamber assigned to the minority. Weak in numbers, the Democrats were even weaker in leadership. James Brooks of New York, who at the outset put the most spirit into their forlorn opposition, had soon to yield his seat to a Republican contestant. Of the other Democrats admitted to seats, none had records that enabled them to command the country’s attention, and only three, Kerr and Voorhees of Indiana and Randall of Pennsylvania, had before them, as it proved, conspicuous careers in the national service.

Notwithstanding Sumner’s praise of the Representatives, the Senate enjoyed at least its ordinary superiority to the House in point of the average of ability. A mighty remnant of the old guard of anti-slavery Senators still remained in harness. Seward and Chase had passed to other services, and Hale of New Hampshire, the wit of Abolitionism, had lost his seat; but Wade, Sumner, Fessenden, Trumbull, and Wilson sat still as members of a great majority in the chamber where they had once fought in a seemingly hopeless minority against the old coalition of Southern Bourbons and Northern Conservatives. As usual, the Senate had few really young men on its rolls. Of the Senators young in point of service in the body, none was gaining influence faster than Wade’s sane and hardworking colleague, Sherman. The Northwest contributed two strong men in Howe of Wisconsin and Howard of Michigan. On the other side of the Chamber, Hendricks of Indiana, Saulsbury of Delaware, Guthrie of Kentucky, and Reverdy Johnson, of Maryland, perhaps the most eminent lawyer in a body where legal ability always commands much respect, gave to the opposition a dignity it had not in the House.

In both chambers, notwithstanding the number of new men of mark, the leadership still went to age and experience, but in both to age and experience joined with uncommon gifts and warmed by an ardor surpassing the ordinary enthusiasm of youth. Sumner, at fifty-four, had sat in the Senate longer than any of his fellows but Wade. Stevens had sat only six years continuously in the House; but in 1853, when he retired from his first service there, he was already an old man, and now, at the beginning of the climacteric period of his career, he was seventy-four.

The two men had more in common than their New England birth. Both stood steadfastly — both, let us rather say, fought aggressively — for ideals which Americans always associate with New England. There have not lived two more thorough-going champions of that principle of individual liberty which New England has taken so deep into her intellectual and religious and political life. Neither was ever content with a compromise on any question of human rights, or ever condoned a distinction based on class or creed or race. Stevens, the more practical of the two, would accept half-way measures, but always as contemptuously as Sumner rejected them.

In many respects, their lives, too, had not been dissimilar. Fully as both had given themselves to the chief moral warfare of their times, both had worked and lived, for the most part, alone. Neither met his fellows with the ready comradeship of the men of the West, or the Southerner’s fondness for close personal relationships. Neither was married, or dwelt in an atmosphere of domestic affection. Neither, it is also not without pertinence to remark, had ever traveled in the Southern states, or lived in intimacy with Southern men and women, or in anywise sympathetically studied Southern life, with which they both wished to deal so intimately, so drastically.

In culture, in range of sympathies and interests, Sumner surpassed Stevens. He counted as his friends the finest spirits of the age, not in America only, but in England and France. Handsome and stately in person, and of distinguished manners, he had won, while on his travels, the regard of the men and women of those countries who were foremost in letters, in society, and in the higher walks of politics. But to men whom he encountered in the public life of his own country he invariably seemed to lack something that their human nature demanded. They found the apostle of the brotherhood of all men curiously without insight into other men’s lives and characters, strangely undesirous or incapable of any touch of elbows. Many thought him overbearing and conceited. His ardors were for causes, not individuals. He had not a good sense of proportion, and he had no sense of humor, but pursued his great ideals for society with an absorption, an Hebraic intensity of fervor, which one is tempted to explain by a Jewish strain he had in his blood. For an American politician, he was extraordinarily doctrinaire, unbending, unregardful of circumstance. No one has ever depicted his character in a better phrase than his own. “The slave of principle,” he once exclaimed, “I call no party master.”

The character of Stevens was less exalted than Sumner’s, but as the years pass the figure of the aged arch-radical — the spare, strong frame, the club foot and limping gait, the strong chin and sarcastic mouth and stern eyes and noble forehead — holds the imagination better than any other of the time. Closer to the earth than Sumner, Stevens was closer also to the ordinary human beings about him; he had a deep insight into men’s passions and weaknesses, and knew how to play upon them. A battered worldfighter, turned parliamentary gladiator, sparing neither open foes nor timid party associates, sometimes exhibiting a fairly demoniacal strength and fierceness of purpose, he was nevertheless given to acts of charity, and he was the greatest humorist that had appeared in Congress since John Randolph of Roanoke. Now with light banter, now with quick repartee, now with biting sarcasm, he shed about him an atmosphere of mirth even in the midst of the most heated contests over the gravest issues. In his private life he was no Puritan like Sumner, but addicted to cards and other pleasures, and he often relaxed into a kind of harsh joviality. The coarser revilers of his memory have not failed to seek in the man’s vices and misfortunes the springs of the malignity they attribute to the statesman. It needs, indeed, but the change of a line here, the deepening of a shadow there, to turn his true likeness into the dire portrait of the old man terrible whom the South feared and hated. But to his familiars in politics he was “old Thad,” hard, but not unlikable, and to thousands who shared his views he was the greatest of all the “ great Commoners ” in our history. To the dispassionate judgment of such as now, without favor or prejudice, review his life-work, his errors seem to have been chiefly excesses of a deep sympathy with the oppressed, that too readily turned into merciless hatred of all whom he thought guilty of oppression or of condoning it. He is but one of many men who in warring against injustice have themselves too often forgotten to be just.

The long wrestling of Congress with the chief problem before the country began with the calling of the roll of the House. Of all the circumstances that swayed the judgment of Northern congressmen at the outset, none, probably, was more damaging to the President’s policy than the mere presence in Washington of men who, four years earlier, had scornfully taken leave of their Northern associates in the government, and who now reappeared, unabashed, to demand as of right high places among the rulers of the nation. Republican newspapers put to good use the comical aspect of these prodigals’ swift return, ridiculing their confident expectation of the fatted calf and the condescending tone in which they announced the terms on which they would consent to be “conciliated.” Humor apart, this particular outcome of the President’s attempt to restore the Union did undeniably give it a look of extraordinary haste.

McPherson, Clerk of the House, obedient to a resolution of a Republican caucus which Stevens had controlled, had left off the roll the names of all claimants from the eleven states that had been in insurrection. Maynard of Tennessee, a Union man throughout the war, tried to get the floor for a protest, and Brooks of New York did get the floor for an attack on the arbitrary course of the majority; but Stevens declined his challenge to a debate, and ignored Maynard as a “ mere outsider.” The House had no sooner chosen Schuyler Colfax Speaker, and adopted rules, than the Republican leader, disregarding the long-standing custom to listen to the President’s message before proceeding to any business, introduced and carried, the rules suspended, a joint resolution providing for a. committee of fifteen, nine from the House and six from the Senate, to inquire into the condition of the states in insurrection. The resolution in its first form also forbade either house to seat representatives from those states until Congress should declare them entitled to representation. This, however, the Senate thought a violation of the Constitutional provision that each house should be the judge of its own elections. But the Joint Committee was promptly named, and for six months the country waited for its report.

Sumner, too, had lost no time in attacking the President’s policy. Two days before the session began, he and Johnson had had a stormy interview, from which the Senator came away convinced that “by the assassination of Lincoln the Rebellion had vaulted into the Presidential Chair.” On the opening day, before the Senate could send the usual first-day messages to the House and to the President, he introduced half a dozen bills and three long series of resolutions. These last were thoroughly characteristic pronouncements. The first series set forth that although the Thirteenth Amendment had already become a part of the Constitution by the consent of three fourths of the loyal states, no state that had been in insurrection could be considered restored to the Union until its legislature should accept it. The second series laid down five other conditions with which the Southern people must comply, and one of these was that they must somehow prove that they were loyal “without mental reservation or equivocation of any kind.” The third series stated the duty of Congress. It must permit only loyal men to take part in the reconstruction, establish the supremacy of national over state laws, and refuse to accept as republican any state government that proscribed loyal men and gave power to rebels.

But Congress, apart from refusing to admit the representatives of the eleven states, showed itself by no means ready to accept the views of its two most advanced leaders. It rejected their contention that the approval of the Thirteenth Amendment by three fourths of the loyal states was sufficient, and the composition of the Committee of Fifteen seemed to augur conservative rather than radical action. Stevens headed the House committee, but with several moderate associates, while the chairmanship of the Senate committee and of the Joint Committee went, not to Sumner, but to his principal rival, Fessenden.

Though less well known to the country than Sumner, Fessenden was the better debater, and his intellect and temperament accorded better with the Senate’s traditions and usages. High-minded and dignified, a great lawyer, and eminently lawyer-like in all his ways, he was the last man in Congress to countenance precipitate or violent measures or to pass on any question without, a thorough study of both sides. One of his first steps was to wait on the President at the head of a subcommittee and express the earnest hope that the Executive and the legislature might work in harmony. The President replied that, although he desired expedition, he had it not in mind to do anything that would make harmony impossible.

The committee then proceeded by subcommittees to take a great mass of testimony. It did not spare labor, but fault has been found with its choice of witnesses. While it summoned some wellknown and representative Southern men, such as Lee and A. H. Stephens, it had recourse chiefly to Republicans, who in far too many instances were Northern men domiciled but a few months in the South. The testimony concerning Alabama, for instance, was given by four men who had lived in the state before the war, two of them deserters from the Confederate army, and by fourteen Northern men, nearly all officers of the army or of the freedmen’s Bureau. The testimony concerning Mississippi was given by two citizens, both Republicans, three generals and one captain in the Union army, a treasury agent, a revenue agent, and a representative of some New England cotton mills. And witnesses thus chosen were in too many instances examined only by men desirous of eliciting the kind of testimony they were anxious to give; for there were but three Democrats on the entire committee.

The President’s message proved a strong and right-tempered statement of his view.² Pointing out that he had had to make choice between continuing military rule and setting up some kind of civil order in the South, he tersely argued that to have denied the conquered states civil institutions would have been to concede some validity to their ordinances of secession; but he agreed with Sumner that it was reasonable to require them to accept the Thirteenth Amendment. Turning then candidly to the question of the status of the freedmen, he declared that for the President to make them voters by a mere executive mandate would have been as unwise as it was unwarranted by the Constitution. A long and unbroken line of precedents left to the states the right to define their own electorates. Yet the general government was bound to protect the negroes in their freedom, and to give them an opportunity to labor as free men labor. “The change in their condition,” he observed, “is the substitution of labor by contract for the status of slavery.” In the long run, he held, the future of the race would depend on its own capacity for progress, and he urged its friends to be neither too quickly discouraged nor too impatient for the remoter ends of philanthropy. For the exhausted South he predicted a swift recovery, to be followed by such prosperity as it could never have had under slavery. It is hardly unjust to Congress to say that in all the oratory of the session there is not a single speech which so nearly anticipates the opinions of a later generation concerning the deeper, non-political issues involved in Reconstruction.

A fortnight later, in response to a Senate call for more information, Johnson briefly recounted the steps he had taken. Sumner had added to the Senate’s resolution a request for the reports of such persons as had gone South on official tours of investigation, and the President accordingly transmitted two documents which have ever since remained conspicuous in the literature of the subject.

One was a brief report by Grant, commendatory of the behavior of the Southern people, who for the most part, he thought, were accepting their defeat in good faith. The other was a much longer report by Major-General Carl Schurz, of a quite contrary tenor, and ending with a plea for suffrage for the freedmen. Grant’s name carried more weight than any other with the Northern public, for he had succeeded Lincoln in the first place in the gratitude and trust of the people. His opinions, however, were based on but four days’ travel in but three states, while Schurz had unhurriedly traversed most of the lower South and could support his conclusions with a great mass of facts and illustrations. B. C. Truman, whom the President sent South after Schurz, brought back an equal mass of facts, tending to offset Schurz’s, but he did not win from Congress or from the country any such attention as they had given to both Schurz and Grant.³

The debate which now began, nominally over the President’s message, was resumed again and again, apropos of various bills and resolutions, until it became the longest, the most involved, the widest ranging in the entire history of Congress. Senators and Representatives did not wait for the report of the joint committee, but addressed themselves at once, as opportunity offered, to the great theme. Lawyers abounded in both chambers, and few resisted the temptation to try their hands at expounding the Constitution in its bearing on the problem, — a rôle which appeals to American statesmen as the rôle of Hamlet appeals to actors. They thus amply justified Lincoln’s preference for solving the problem first and searching for the correct theory afterwards. If one attends only to the literature of this side of the controversy, one is reminded of the congress of German revolutionists who split hairs over the theory of a free constitution until their revolution evaporated beneath them. But the American Congress did not resolve itself into an academic senate. Dialectical subtleties did not divert the leaders from their practical purposes. Through an atmosphere opaque with theory it rained for weeks bills and resolutions and amendments to the Constitution. If among these Congress was slow to choose which it. would enact, that hesitation was in itself a very practical deference to an equally hesitant public opinion.

The two men who knew their own minds best did not fail to follow up the blow at the President’s policy which they had struck on the opening day. December 18, in committee of the whole House on the state of the Union, Stevens opened the debate on the message with a speech of extraordinary directness, candor, and force. He chose still to treat the President respectfully, but coolly interpreted the message as an invitation to the legislature to take control. For the authority of Congress to do what it would, he went straight to the clause of the Constitution which permits new states to be brought into the Union. The eleven states of the Confederacy, he declared, were outside of the Union, “to all intents and purposes for which the conqueror might choose so to consider them.” With a homely illustration he ridiculed the “ dreaming theorists” who held that no state had seceded, because no state has a constitutional right to secede. A supporter of that theory, he related, having paused in an argument for it long enough to describe a recent atrocious murder, a listener had interrupted him and declared he was mistaken ; there had been no murder. “ How so?” he asked; “I saw it with my own eyes.” But the other rejoined: “You are wrong. No murder was or could be committed, for the law forbids it.”

If, however, — Stevens went on, — instead of treating these eleven states as conquered provinces without the Union, members preferred to treat them as dead carcasses lying within the Union, Congress could still proceed freely under the clause requiring the United States to guarantee a republican form of government to every state; for he brushed contemptuously aside the notion that the President alone could act for “ the United States ” in a business so plainly demanding distinctly legislative action. On either theory, Congress had full powers, and it must not stop with halfway measures. It must hold the rebel states in a firm grip as mere territories until they should do all that justice to the negro and the future safety of the Union required, and until an amendment to the Constitution, which he had already proposed, should force them either to enfranchise the freedmen or to give up their representation in Congress based on negro population. He would thus secure perpetual ascendency to “the party of the Union.” What the President had already accomplished he entirely disregarded. The Southern legislatures, then busy with their “ black codes,” he described as “an aggregation of whitewashed rebels.” One searches the speech in vain for a single gleam of mercy or forgiveness for the conquered, a single expression of concern about the future of the white people of the South.

Three days later, Sumner in the Senate, speaking on a bill introduced by his colleague, Wilson, to secure the freedmen in their civil rights, showed as little respect for the President’s handiwork and much less respect for the President himself. The speech sounded like an echo of the famous oration on “ The Crime against Kansas.” Sumner had already accused Johnson of sending in a “whitewashing message,” like Pierce’s message about Kansas, and now, to prove the charge, he read to the Senate statement after statement, mainly from his private correspondence, all to the effect that the Southern people remained contumacious and disloyal, and story after story of cruelties to negroes, — a method of inflaming the North which he continued to employ. Here, he exclaimed, was a region vaster than Kansas, given over, as Kansas had once been, to the tyranny of the slave barons; and he quoted with good effect Burke’s maxim that laws made by masters to protect slaves always lack “an executory principle.” But he did not in his peroration strike as successfully as in his earlier speeches the note of passionate indignation. “Pass the bill under consideration,” he ended, — “pass any bill, — but do not let this crying injustice rage any longer. An avenging God cannot sleep while such things find countenance. If you are not ready to be the Moses of an oppressed people, do not be its Pharaoh.” The entire speech suffers by comparison with the inornate trenchancy, the harsh candor, of Stevens.

The real struggle between the President and the radicals was for the support of the moderate Republicans. The Democrats had at once taken sides with the President. They could accept all he had done without departing widely from their stand on the Crittenden Resolution of 1861, and their thin ranks hungered for the recruits that would cross the thresholds of both houses the day Congress should declare the eleven states of the Confederacy entitled to representation. Finding it extremely inconvenient, as Lowell remarked, “to be so long dead,” they made their support only too vigorous. Democratic approval of the President’s policy did not commend it to Republicans, who remembered his own Democratic antecedents, and called to mind what had happened when Tyler, another Democratic and Southern Vice-President, had succeeded Harrison, a Northern Whig. Raymond, who now, coming forward as the leader of the President’s Republican supporters in the House, undertook to answer Stevens, showed plainly his vexation with the over-eager championship of his principal by the opposition. When he rose, an Ohio Democrat, a follower of the discredited Vallandigliam, had just sat down, and Raymond began by sarcastically congratulating the opposition on its belated zeal to help restore the Union.

Turning then to Stevens, When and how — Raymond asked — had the insurgent states ever succeeded in taking themselves out of the Union? Not by their secession ordinances, surely, for the war had been fought on the theory that these were null and void; they merely announced an intention which could be carried out only by force, and in the appeal to force the South had not won, but lost. Nor would he accept the doctrine that without really withdrawing from the Union these states had lost their statehood. He held, with Lincoln, that men, not states, had been guilty of the crime of rebellion, and on men, not states, the penalty should fall. If, as Stevens seemed to hold, we had been at war with an independent republic, then what right had members to talk of “traitors,” or of “loyalty,” — unless, indeed, those terms were applied as the Southerners applied them ? On that theory, was not the nation bound by international law to assume the debts of the Confederacy ?

It was reasonable, he conceded, that the President, as Commander-in-Chief, should exact from the conquered insurgents certain guaranties for the future. It was reasonable to require them, in reorganizing their state governments, to abjure the heresy of state sovereignty, to prohibit slavery, to confiscate state debts incurred in aid of the insurrection. The nation ought also to protect the Freedmen in their new rights, and both houses of Congress ought to hold every man who could not prove his loyalty to the Union disqualified for membership. But he would support no sweeping confiscation, no measure of mere hatred and revenge. He condemned, not the theory alone, but the vindictive spirit, the narrow-mindedness, the unwisdom, of the radical policy.

Jenckes of Rhode Island, rising immediately after Raymond, remarked truly enough that the practically important difference between him and Stevens was not so much a difference of theory as a difference of purpose and spirit. Both held that the nation could exact guaranties from the conquered; it mattered little that one would deal with them as men, while the other would deal with them as states.

The next day Congress adjourned over the Christmas holidays, and at the end of the recess the opposition to the President seemed to have gained confidence and heat. First Bingham of Ohio and then his colleague Shellabarger set upon Raymond and his uncertain following. Shellabarger’s speech has a place of its own in the discussion, for at the outset, in a single prodigious sentence, he advanced one of the four general theories under which later students have grouped the various views men took of the problem. The rebellion, he held, had not taken any state out of the Union, but it had so far overthrown the loyal governments of eleven states that they had lost their rights and powers as members of the Union; the United States, by Congress, might, therefore, exercise for the time being all local functions of the overthrown governments, and name whatever conditions of restoration it pleased. This theory, which has come to be called the theory of “forfeited rights,” is hardly distinguishable from the “state-suicide.” theory of Sumner, and had the same practical corollaries with the “conquered-province” theory of Stevens. Only the presidential and the Democratic or Southern theories would have set any limits to the power of the conqueror over the conquered. To Raymond’s inquiry for the “specific act” by which the insurrectionary states had ceased to be states in the Union, Shellabarger made a reply which, if not entirely cogent as constitutional law, served a more practical purpose: he threw into stirring rhetoric the entire grievance of the nation against the Confederate South. The “specific act,” he declared, was a great civil war, waged by the mass of the Southern people, as states, against the nation’s life. Recounting the contumacious steps by which the Southerners had come to their final complete rebellion, he reached his climax with a recital of the worst enormities ever charged against them. “They framed iniquity and universal murder into law. They besieged, for years, your capital, and sent your bleeding armies, in rout, back here upon the very sanctuary of your national power. Their pirates burned your unarmed commerce upon every sea. They carved the bones of your unburied heroes into ornaments, and drank from goblets made out of their skulls. They poisoned your fountains, put mines under your soldiers’ prisons, organized bands whose leaders were concealed in your homes, and whose commissions ordered the torch and yellow fever to be carried to your cities, and to your women and children. They planned one universal bonfire of the North from Lake Ontario to the Missouri.” Students may be wrong in holding that out of all the theories Congress made conscious choice of Shellabarger’s, and shaped by it the policy finally adopted; but the passion expressed in such sentences as these successfully combated the moderation of Republicans like Raymond and Seward.

The very next day came a division that tested the President’s strength with the Republicans of the House. Unfortunately for his supporters, the question was on some resolutions proposed by Voorhees, — a Democrat, and one whom Republicans regarded as a Copperhead,—endorsing the doctrine of the message and thanking the President for his efforts to restore civil institutions in the South. Bingham offered as a substitute a vague expression of trust in Johnson, but the majority, at a word from Stevens, pigeonholed both proposals by referring them to a standing committee. The House thus practically refused the President a vote of confidence, and Raymond, opposing the reference, found himself with but one Republican supporter. The division can hardly be held to have marked an open breach between the President and the House majority, but it did mark the failure of the attempt to commit the moderate Republicans to the support of Johnson and Seward. Raymond afterwards declared that he would have succeeded if the Democrats had only kept quiet, or had taken sides against the President.

In the Senate, three Republicans, Cowan of Pennsylvania, Dixon of Connecticut, and Doolittle of Wisconsin, had from the first fully accepted the President’s programme. A little later, Norton of Minnesota joined them. Three others, Lane of Kansas, Stewart of Nevada, and Morgan of New York, seemed also to incline that way, while the two Senators from West Virginia took an independent and uncertain attitude. As the Democrats, however, numbered but eleven, the President would have far less than a majority, even if he should win over all the doubtful men. But in the Senate debates he had abler champions than in the House. So long as the discussion concerned itself with theory, so long as Senators merely set one general scheme against another and tested them by the Constitution and the laws, Reverdy Johnson, in particular, could hold his own with Fessenden and Trumbull, he could more than hold his own with Sumner, who was never strong on Constitutional or legal questions. Moreover, the Republican leaders, Sumner and Wade excepted, were very loath to break with the President, though they held that Congress, and not he, should control Reconstruction, and though they indicated clearly enough that they disrelished some of the too swift results of his policy. But all saw the imminence of a breach. The political atmosphere was charged with the fear and expectation of a crisis. While the South waited, more and more anxiously, to learn whether the North would endorse the mild terms Lincoln and Johnson had offered, and while the North waited on Congress, Congress waited on its committee; and the committee itself, it is now known, underwent much hesitation, watching the conduct of the South and studying public opinion in the North.

But Northern public opinion at this time is still a difficult study. If it had veered since the summer, when it seemed, on the whole, to favor the President, the newspapers and other organs did not clearly indicate the change. Lowell, who as early as April of 1865 had in a thoughtful essay reached the conclusion that nothing but the ballot would secure the negro in his freedom, and who a little later had remarked, “There must be a right somewhere to enforce what all see to be essential,” may have merely anticipated the movement of many slower minds. The “black codes” which one Southern legislature after another enacted during the winter caused more and more uneasiness among men inclined to moderation. Correspondents of newspapers, Bureau agents, soldiers, and other Northern men in the South, finding, naturally enough, no cordial welcome there, wrote home letters of a kind to stir up fresh indignation against the Southern people, whom they for the most part described as unsubdued in spirit, malignant as ever toward the North, and more malignant than ever toward the blacks. But no clear public sentiment urged Congress on to a breach with the President, or to a severe course with the South. Congress, on the contrary, jealous of its prerogatives, heated with its own debates, moved faster than the country. Having, however, no programme of its own, it felt its way forward, after the wont of English and American legislatures, with measures that dealt only with particular features of the situation. By the end of January, out of the countless proposals submitted to the two houses, three had taken shape in bills, gone through committees, and were following the usual course toward enactment. January 11, Lyman Trumbull, whose prestige in the Senate was less only than Sumner’s and Fessenden’s, reported from the Senate Committee on the Judiciary a new Freedmen’s Bureau bill, and a bill to secure all American citizens in their civil rights. Eleven days later, the Joint Committee presented as a partial report a new amendment to the Constitution, which aimed to reduce the representation in Congress of any state which denied the ballot to any class of its citizens. The House, meanwhile, debated and passed a bill to enfranchise negroes in the District of Columbia, but the Senate, knowing that the President would veto it, never brought it to a vote.

The Freedmen’s Bureau Bill, gaining the right of way, became the first great measure of the session. Trumbull, who managed it, was no follower of Sumner and Stevens, but one of those Republicans who were striving to keep the President and Congress from drifting into a quarrel. Independent but not radical in his habit of thought, he had come by his anti-slavery convictions gradually, and had never lost in his zeal for that or any other cause his sense of proportion or his respect for law and precedent. Sumner’s precipitancy, violence, and wildness on Constitutional questions irritated him, as they did Fessenden. He now offered his bill, not as a rebuke to the President, but to correct obvious faults of the existing law. The sting of it was in its tail, for the last enacting clause gave Bureau agents jurisdiction over all cases of denial of civil rights to negroes, and made every such discrimination a misdemeanor. This was a plain response to the black codes.

But nothing in the spirited but dignified debate in the Senate indicated that any one regarded the bill as essentially contrary to the President’s policy. Hendricks attacked it vehemently, but for specific reasons, as that it would prolong military rule in time of peace, that it increased executive poweis which ought rather to be curtailed, and that it entailed extravagant expenditures. The House substituted for it a similar bill of its own, and this, being accepted by the Senate with a few changes, went to the President on February 9, with the approval of every Republican who had voted on it.

Johnson had observed the usage that keeps a President politely ignorant of the progress of measures in Congress until they come to him for his signature, and many Republicans did not begin to fear that he would veto the bill until the ten days which the law allowed him to consider it had nearly passed. By approving it, he might, without incurring any serious charge of inconsistency, have placated Republicans who already antagonized him and lessened the distrust of him in the minds of others. But not even Andrew Jackson had less fondness for compromise than this other Tennesseean who now sat in the White House. It is no wonder that those who knew Johnson’s pugnacious temper gave Seward credit for the restraint in his conduct and his messages since the beginning of the session.

At the end of the ten days, Johnson vetoed the bill. His veto message kept the level tone of the others, but he softened none of his decided objections. He could see, he declared, no necessity for haste, since the existing law would remain in force at least a year longer. But he opposed the new measure mainly on Constitutional grounds. He objected to it because it granted judicial powers to Bureau agents, who as a rule, moreover, were ignorant of law and strangers to the South, and permitted them to try criminal cases without juries; because it provided for the support of indigent persons out of the national treasury, and for taking land — in some cases, from minors, from insane persons, and from persons perfectly loyal to the Union — without due process of law. He also felt it to be unwise to strengthen the expectation of gratuities from the government which the first Bureau Act had planted in the minds of the negroes. He ended by pointing out that Congress was here legislating for eleven states to which it denied representation.

With this, his first veto, Johnson won a momentary triumph. The next day, Trumbull answered well his objections to the bill, but on the motion to pass it over the veto five Republicans who had originally voted for it, and three who had been absent, voted against it. The majority for overriding the veto was but thirty to eighteen, two short of the necessary two thirds, Senators Foote of Vermont and Wright of New Jersey being ill and absent. The House. having no occasion to act on the veto, could express its dissatisfaction only by passing again the resolution pledging both houses to seat no representatives from the eleven states until they should be readmitted to the Union; and this time the Senate concurred. But from the day of the veto the House, in all its relations with the President, utterly discarded the usual observances of courtesy. Stevens never again alluded to him otherwise than in a tone of contemptuous raillery. As the majority against him in the House was much more than two thirds, nothing but the doubtful margin of two or three votes more than one third in the Senate stood between him and the loss of his negative on legislation. The situation demanded of him, above all things, caution. But his blood was up. On the evening of Washington’s birthday, three days after the veto, temptation beset him in the shape of a crowd assembled in front of the White House, calling for a speech, and he delivered himself into the hands of his enemies.

Secretary McCulloch, fearing what happened, had urged his chief not to make a speech, and Johnson had declared that he would make none. He would only appear before the crowd, thank them for their visit, and bid them good-night. That would doubtless have been his wisest course; but he would have done no harm by speaking if he had only made such a speech as Seward was making that same evening in Cooper Union in New York; for Seward was a past master in the oratory that damages opponents without exasperating them to a more determined opposition. With a good-natured, stingless humor, he made fun of the President’s critics in Congress. They had got the Union restored, he said, and restored without slavery, without state sovereignty, without payment for slaves, without the rebel debts. They had got, in fact, all that the war was fought for, and more. They did not really know themselves what else they wanted; at least, they could not agree among themselves as to what they wanted. Yet they were discontent. Like the nervous man in the play of The Nervous Man and the Man of Nerve, they would not take what they had got because they had not had their own way of getting it.

But Johnson could not be silent when the crowd pressed him to speak, nor keep his head when he had begun. Encouraged by the sympathy of his hearers, excited by their applause, shouts, and approving interruptions, he went on from a defense of “my policy” to a reckless and savage attack on his assailants. He called the Joint Committee an “irresponsible directory,” and began to compare the leading radicals in and out of Congress to the leaders of the rebellion. As he had once fought the Davises and Toombses and Slidells, he said, so now he stood ready to fight others who opposed the union of the states. The crowd called out, “Give us the names ! ” and he was so incredibly indiscreet as to respond, “I look upon, as being opposed to the fundamental principles of this government, and as now laboring to destroy them, Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, Charles Sumner and Wendell Phillips of Massachusetts.” Stevens had said of a certain utterance of the President that “if a British king had made it to Parliament, it would have cost him his head,” and Wendell Phillips had spoken of Johnson as an obstacle to be removed. He answered by accusing them of advocating his assassination, and declaring that he had no fear.

He had undone in two or three minutes all that he had accomplished in behalf of his policy by his statesmanlike messages. He had practically declared war on the majority in Congress. He had thrown away every advantage he might have drawn from the dignity of his high office. The speech remains to this day the most inept and unfortunate utterance ever made by any president, unless we except certain later speeches of Johnson himself.

Nevertheless, the leaders of Congress laid now themselves to take anxious thought. To override the President’s resistance, they must make sure of a twothirds majority in the Senate, and there might be one consequence of defying him which as practical politicians they were exceedingly loath to incur. Hitherto, contrary to many fears, Johnson had made little use of the patronage to strengthen himself either with Congress or the country. Petroleum V. Nasby, writing in the character of a Democrat with his eyes on a post office, had for months been wondering what the President was about that he took so little thought of his friends. “In what particular,” he asked, “hez Andrew Johnson showed hisself to be a Dimokrat ? In the name uv Dimokrisy, let me ask, ‘ Where are the offices? ’ ” The Washington’s Birthday Speech gave him hopes, but a week later he groaned, “Andrew Johnson may be worthy of Dimokratic support, but he hez a queer way uv showin’ it.” So, too, no doubt, thought many Republican office-holders and their friends in Congress. More statesmanlike misgivings prompted. others to exhaust all the means of conciliation. Eminent Republicans outside of Congress, growing deeply concerned, tried to act as mediators. John Sherman defended the President, pointing out to his irate fellow members that, in all but the unfortunate speech of February 22, Johnson had followed in the footsteps of Lincoln, — a judgment to which, after many years, Sherman returned. But the leaders grew firmer and drew closer together in the face of the blast from the White House. Few threw caution to the winds as Stevens did, when, in his second set speech of the session, he met the President’s coarse assault with ridicule hardly more elevated, but infinitely more effective; but they pressed the Civil Rights Bill to its passage, and they took high-handed measures to secure a two-thirds majority in the Senate.

The second of the two bills which had issued from the Senate Judiciary Committee on January 11 was the first attempt by the Federal government to establish a citizenship of the United States. It declared all persons born in the United States, and not subjects of any foreign jurisdiction, excluding Indians not taxed, to be citizens, and therefore entitled to the same civil rights, and subject only to the same penalties, with all other citizens; privileged to sue and be sued, to give evidence in the courts, to acquire, hold, and convey property, to make and enforce contracts. To deprive any such inhabitant of such rights, even under color of state law or usage, was made a felony. For the machinery with which to enforce these provisions the committee, by a clever inspiration, had gone to the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850.

The debate in both houses turned largely on the right of Congress to confer citizenship. The opposition contended that the privilege belonged exclusively to the states, which had ahvays exercised it. The supporters of the bill found a doubtful precedent in the case of the inhabitants of Louisiana and of the territory acquired from Mexico, and of certain Indians, whom the general government had made citizens by treaty. Shellabarger called the raising of the freedmen to citizenship “naturalization.” Wilson of Iowa, House manager of the bill, justified it by a new doctrine, to which, a few years later, the Supreme Court, in adjudicating a different question, gave its adhesion. “I assert,” he said, “that we possess the power to do those things that governments are organized to do.” The enforcing clauses came in for a different set of objections. Hendricks, in the Senate, moved without success to strike out one which empowered the President to use the land and naval forces in executing the act. Bingham and others protested in vain against the penal clause, which would make a felon of a state judge for merely obeying the Constitution or the laws of his own state, if these should discriminate against negroes. Save for a verbal alteration to make it clear that “ civil rights ” did not include the suffrage, the bill passed both houses, substantially unchanged.

Trumbull afterwards declared that up to the time of its passage he had no fear of its being vetoed. Before introducing it, he had submitted it to the President, asking him to state whatever objections he might have to it, and Johnson had offered none. Nevertheless, the rumor of a second veto was soon in the air, and the leaders of Congress hastened their preparations to override it. If they could not win over enough of the waverers, there were two other ways of gaining votes in the Senate: to admit new states into the Union, and to unseat Democrats. They tried both.

In 1864, the voters of the territory of Colorado had rejected a constitution regularly submitted to them under an enabling act; but the next summer, without any authority from Congress, they held a convention, framed a new constitution, ratified it by a narrow majority, and elected a legislature, which in turn chose two Republican Senators. A bill to admit the territory to statehood, introduced earlier in the session, was now taken up and pressed in the Senate; but Sumner, much as he desired the two additional votes, which, it was presumed, would be cast against the President, could not stomach the word “white” in the suffrage clause of the constitution. He opposed the bill fiercely. It was defeated, and the project was put aside for a time, while the Senate majority turned to the second expedient, which did not require the concurrence of the House or the approval of the President.

The Democratic Senator whose title to his seat seemed most vulnerable was Richard Stockton of New Jersey, who had succeeded Ten Eyck, a Republican, in December. In the legislature which elected him, the Democrats had a majority of five in the Senate, while the House was evenly divided; and for a time, although Stockton had received the nomination of his party caucus, nine Democrats refused to vote for him. During the deadlock, the joint assembly of the two houses, which the state constitution recognized as “the legislature in joint meeting,” changed its rules, under which a majority of the votes cast had been sufficient to elect, so as to require a majority of the entire membership of both houses. At a later meeting, however, the rules were again changed, to permit a plurality to elect; and this step many Republicans favored, thinking that their candidate would have more votes than Stockton, until they perceived that Stockton’s friends were voting for it. On the ballot that followed, Stockton received a plurality, but not a majority. He was declared elected, and no question of the validity of his election was raised in the joint meeting or in either of the houses. But after his admission to the Senate a protest was presented, signed by all the Republicans in the legislature. The Senate Judiciary Committee, strongly Republican, considered the case, and Trumbull reported a resolution declaring Stockton entitled to his seat. The report was signed by every member of the Committee except Clark of New Hampshire, and he at the time made no minority report. But on March 22, while the President had the Civil Rights Bill under consideration, New Jersey having in the meantime chosen a new legislature, in which the Republicans had a majority, Clark called up the resolution and moved a substitute which would unseat Stockton.

In the debate that followed, Fessenden made an acute legal argument against Stockton’s claim, on the ground that it requires a distinct “legislative act,” impossible otherwise than by consent of a majority of both houses of a legislature, to elect a Senator. But Hendricks found ample law and usage to sustain the right of the majority in the joint session of the New Jersey legislature to validate beforehand an election by a plurality. It is impossible to believe that a mere change of mind about the law of the case had moved the Senate to reconsider its practical acquiescence in Stockton’s claim. Sumner, who did not stickle over points of legality in a fight for principle, doubtless expressed correctly the feeling of many Republicans by quoting from Hoyle, “When in doubt, take the trick.”

Wright, Stockton’s colleague, and a Democrat, was ill at Trenton; Foote of Vermont, a Republican, lay at the point of death; Dixon, a Johnson-Republican, completed the list of absentees from illness. Morrill of Maine was paired with Wright, and a count of heads showed that without his vote Clark’s motion would be beaten. The Republican leaders pressed Morrill to free himself from the pair, and he warned Stockton that after allowing Wright a reasonable time to get to Washington he would feel at liberty to vote. Wright, receiving this word from Stockton, telegraphed back that he could not come to Washington for some days, and that he trusted Morrill, from whom he had received no direct communication, would respect the agreement.

The question being put on Clark’s motion, Morrill did keep his word, and the motion was lost. The roll was then called on the original resolution seating Stockton, and the vote stood twenty-one to twenty, Morrill and Stockton not voting. Senators gathered about the perplexed and unhappy Morrill, and urged him to vote. Cries of “Vote! vote!” came from all parts of the chamber, Sumner’s voice rising hoarsely above the others. Morrill yielded, asked that his name be called, and voted, making a tie. Instantly, amid intense excitement, Stockton was on his feet, read the telegram from Wright, demanded that his name be called, and voted aye. The President pro tempore declared the resolution passed.

But on Monday, the 26th, Sumner offered a resolution that Stockton had no right to vote in his own case. It appearing that this was the sense of the Senate, Stockton consented to withdraw his vote. On the 27th, the case was reconsidered.

Morrill, finding his situation unbearable, had made another pair and vanished. Stewart, one of the waverers, had also disappeared. Wright telegraphed that if the Senate would postpone the division three days he would be present. But the New Jersey legislature, having finished its ordinary business, was waiting to elect a Senator so soon as it should get word of a vacancy. The veto of the Civil Rights Bill lay on the table. “Disease,” said Sumner, “has made a pair between the absent Senator from New Jersey and the absent Senator from Vermont,” — forgetting that disease had neglected to secure a pair for Dixon. The Senate would not wait. By a majority of one vote, Stockton was unseated. Another telegram from Wright, promising to be present the next day, being read, and a Democrat changing his vote in order to be able to move a reconsideration, Clark himself moved to reconsider, the motion was voted down, and the case thus finally disposed of.

Stockton’s successor, however, did not appear at once, as had been planned. One Scovel, president of the New Jersey Senate, in which he had the casting vote, went over to Johnson, — lured, it was charged, with the control of the Federal patronage of the state, — and would not permit the chamber to meet in joint session with the House of Representatives. Stockton’s chair remained vacant to the end of the session. But the day after he was unseated Foote died, and on April 6, the second day of the debate over the veto of the Civil Rights Bill, his successor, George F. Edmunds, appeared. Meanwhile, Stewart had practically abandoned his independent stand.

In the veto message, Johnson returned to the dignity which he had so fatally abandoned in his speech to the mob. Such legislation, he once more observed, ought not to be passed while the eleven states which it particularly affected were without voice in Congress. He gravely questioned the wisdom of granting citizenship at once to four million people who but yesterday were slaves. He could see no reason why it was necessary to make them citizens in order to endow them with civil rights, when thousands of foreign-born Americans enjoyed civil rights without citizenship. Surely, there was the same need of a period of probation in the one case as in the other. Nor could he find for the measure any warrant in the Constitution. If Congress could annul state laws which discriminated between whites and blacks in the ways mentioned in the bill, why could it not annul those which prohibited intermarriage between whites and blacks ? He objected particularly to the penalizing of state officials for obeying the laws of their states, and to the unwise transfer of jurisdiction from state courts to Federal courts. He disagreed entirely with Congress as to the scope of the second clause of the Thirteenth Amendment, holding that it would apply only if an attempt to revive slavery were made. On the ground of policy, he again protested that Congress would wrong both races in the South if it persisted in thrusting between them men whose interest it would be to foment strife. Yet he stood ready, he declared, to defend the freedmen, and to coöperate with Congress in defending them, against any attempt to deprive them of their liberty.

Trumbull, meeting the President on the plane of statesmanship, answered well his Constitutional objections, and then, descending lower, made an apt ad captandum quotation from a speech in which Johnson, as Senator, had protested against a veto of President Buchanan. Reverdy Johnson and Cowan followed in defense of the veto. But the time when serious argument would count with the Senate was past. The President had set himself against the will of Congress. He had again refused to yield when he might have yielded without any surrender of principle. The temper of the legislature rose high against his stubbornness. Senators, instead of listening to the speeches, were studying the rolls and eagerly discussing the probable vote for and against the veto. Wright had at last returned to Washington. If he and Dixon could both attend, there would be sixteen for the veto out of a total of forty-nine, and no one knew how either Morgan of New York or Willey of West Virginia would vote. In order to facilitate the attendance of the two invalids, the Democrats asked that a particular hour the next day be fixed upon for the division. But Wade passionately exclaimed, “If God Almighty has stricken any member so that he cannot be here to uphold the dictation of a despot, I thank Him for His interposition,”— whereupon MacDougal of California, a brilliant but dissipated Senator, whom his fellows had thought hopelessly intoxicated, rose and dramatically compared the God whom Wade had invoked to Ahriman, the evil deity of Persian mythology, whose angels were suffering and disease. The next day, Lane and Wade continued the controversy, one hotly defending Johnson, the other openly accusing him of treachery.

With the putting of the question came the crisis in the longest and fiercest of all the struggles between Congress and the Executive. Wright, pale and ill, was in his seat. Only two seats were empty, — Stockton’s and Dixon’s. Dixon was close at hand, ready to be carried into the chamber if his vote would save the veto. The suspense lasted to the very end of the roll call. When Morgan voted aye, Senate and galleries broke into applause, quickly subdued into a breathless silence until Willey’s name was reached, and he, too, voted aye. The ayes were thirty-three, — one more than a two-thirds majority, even if Dixon should appear. The House, suspending its rules, made shorter work of its share in the business.

Whatever one may think of the wisdom or the righteousness of the course of the majority, one is bound to admire its boldness. Finding the prestige of the Executive greater than it had ever been before, the new Congress had assaulted it as no other Congress ever did. From the beginning of the government only six bills had been passed over the veto, one in Tyler’s time, and five in the time of Pierce, and they were all unimportant, routine measures. Never before had Congress enacted a general and deepreaching law without the President’s consent. Nor had any other President ever been humiliated before the country as Johnson was. “He resembleth Jaxon muchly,” wrote Nasby, still sighing vainly for the post office at Confedrit X Roads, “in thet Jaxon hed a polisy which he carried out, while our Moses hez a polisy which he can’t carry out.”

But the execution of the law lay with the President, and even thus early the leaders of the majority began to consider that in order to gain complete control they might have to make use of another power of Congress never used before. If the President remained stubborn, they might have to remove him from office by impeachment. For that drastic course, however, they would again need a twothirds majority in the Senate, and their margin of one vote was too narrow. April 17, Wilson, who had voted against the bill to admit Colorado, called it up for reconsideration. Sumner still stood firm, attacking not only the suffrage clause of the Constitution, but the legality of the convention that framed it and the election at which it was ratified. “It is whispered,” he said candidly, “that you need two more votes on this floor. Sir, there is something you need more than two votes.” This time, however, the bill passed. But in neither Senate nor House did it have an impressive majority, and when Johnson sent it back with his third veto of the session, pointing out the injustice of allowing one Representative and two Senators to a dwindling population of perhaps thirty thousand, the Senate took no further action.

A bill to admit Nebraska was also passed, but so near to the end of the session that a pocket veto sufficed to dispose of it. The majority could gain no recruits otherwise than by winning over waverers or members of the opposition.

Nevertheless, Congress went on with the measures it had most at heart. The chief of these was the proposal of an amendment to the Constitution, which in the course of the session underwent many changes.

The original resolution, offered by Stevens on December 5, dealt only with representation in the House, and would have made the number of legal voters in each state the basis of apportionment. Early in January, Spalding of Ohio proposed to keep population as the basis, but to exclude negroes, except in states that permitted them to vote. Blaine, offering a plan not very different from Spalding’s, pointed out that, as the ratio of voters to population varied widely in different states, an apportionment based on voters alone would work much inequality among the states of the North. Conkling followed with two alternative wordings. The Joint Committee, in the draft of an amendment which constituted its first recommendation, stuck to the old basis of population, excluding Indians not taxed and all persons whom any state might disfranchise on account of race or color.

All the plans aimed to deprive the South of representation for the negroes unless it enfranchised them. In 1860, under the old, iniquitous compromise which permitted three-fifths of the slaves to be counted in the apportionment, the eleven states which seceded had elected sixtyone members of the House. Let them count all their negroes, and they would have seventy members. Forbid them to count any negroes, and they would have but forty-five. Early in the discussion, Jenckes of Rhode Island, again logical and far-sighted, pointed out that by requiring some qualification for voters not forbidden by the amendment the South might disfranchise the mass of the negroes and yet escape the penalty. But the majority was not ready, while so many Northern states still declined to let negroes vote, to solve the problem by putting into the Constitution an outright manhood-suffrage provision. Besides, the chances were that such an article would not get the approval of a majority even of the Northern states. Nevertheless, Sumner and a group of radicals were ready for the step. They denounced the committee plan as an infamous compromise, and Sumner discharged against it one great and several lesser orations, full of stately passion and of his peculiarly violent invective. To pass it, he said, would be to drop a “political obscenity” into the text of the Constitution. Fessenden, in reply, showed a clearer understanding of the actual force and working of the very principles Sumner championed, and ridiculed keenly his labored objurgations and the cloudy indefiniteness of his counter-proposals. Stevens, also, who stood in no awe of Sumner, thought his objections “puerile and pedantic.” But Sumner carried with him enough Republicans to keep the majority in the Senate far below two-thirds, and the amendment therefore failed.

This was between the first two vetoes. On April 30, three days after the final passage of the Civil Rights Bill, the Joint Committee submitted, as its scheme of Reconstruction, three measures: the constitutional amendment changed and enlarged; a bill giving to the eleven waiting Southern commonwealths the hope that, if they ratified the amendment, and the same should become a part of the Constitution, they would be restored to their places in the Union; and a bill to disqualify for Federal offices all who had held high places under the Confederacy and all who had maltreated captured Union soldiers.

The amendment now had five sections. The first took under Federal protection the privileges and immunities of citizenship. The second dealt with the basis of representation, providing that if any state disfranchised any class of its citizens its representation in the House should be reduced in the proportion the number of disfranchised males of voting age bore to all other males of voting age. The third withheld, until 1870, from all who had voluntarily adhered to the insurrection, the right to vote in Federal elections. The fourth forbade the payment by either the national or the state governments of any part of the Confederate debt. The fifth empowered Congress to enforce the other four by “appropriate legislation.”

When the committee submitted its programme, its chairman was ill, and the report that should have accompanied the three measures did uot appear until the middle of June. Written by Fessenden, it was a good statement of a view and policy midway between the inclination of the more moderate Republicans opposed to the President and the desire of men like Sumner. Granting, as a “profitless abstraction,” the contention that the rebellious states had never been out of the Union, the committee held that the insurgents “had destroyed their state constitutions in respect to the vital principles which connected their states with the Union and secured their federal relations,” — to which difficult version of what had happened the minority replied by asking what practical difference it made whether these states had rightfully seceded or had ceased to be states by the illegal conduct of their citizens. When the majority denied the President any warrant in the Constitution for his course, it spoke more convincingly than when it tried to find there any clear sanction for its own specific recommendations. It was most convincing when it appealed to common sense. If — it contended — these eleven states had lost none of their rights by the attempt at secession, and were now allowed full representation for all the blacks, “then is the government of the United States powerless for its own protection, and flagrant rebellion, carried to the extreme of civil war, is a pastime which any state may play at, not only certain it can lose nothing in any case, but may even be the gainer by defeat.”

In the House, where the enlarged amendment was first considered, no serious change was made in any section. But when it emerged from the Senate’s critical scrutiny it was sweepingly altered. The first section now contained the essential provisions of the Civil Rights Bill. The second was differently and more carefully worded. The third obviated the necessity of passing the first of the Joint Committee’s accompanying bills, for, instead of disfranchising all Confederates until 1870, it disqualified for office all who, having once taken an officeholder’s oath to support the Constitution, had afterwards joined in the insurrection. Congress was, however, empowered to remove by a two-thirds vote of both houses the disabilities thus incurred. The fourth section, besides forbidding the payment of any Confederate debt, forbade the questioning the validity of any part of the national debt. Only the fifth section remained as it had been. Democrats, and some Republicans as well, objected strongly to the third section as an invasion of the President’s power to grant pardons, as even voiding the pardons he had already granted; while others questioned the wisdom of forbidding the Southern people to choose their natural leaders to office. Reverdy Johnson truthfully observed that the clause disqualified “ nine tenths of the gentlemen of the South.” On the other hand, the radical Republicans were still discontent with the first section because it permitted the withholding of the ballot from negroes. But the more moderate Republicans, led by Fessenden and Trumbull, still had control. The amendment in its final form received the approval of three fourths of the Senate, even Sumner consenting, and on June 13 the House, concurring in all the Senate’s amendments, sent it to the states for their approval.

It was the intention of the Joint Committee to offer the amendment to the eleven waiting Southern states as the sole condition of their restoration to the Union; but the bill which conveyed the promise of restoration was never passed. Instead, Congress ended the labors of its first session on Reconstruction by passing over Johnson’s fourth veto a Freedmen’s Bureau bill, to hold for but two years, and differing in several other provisions from the one that had failed.

It is doubtful, however, if the clearest of promises of restoration to the Union would have induced any but one of the eleven waiting commonwealths to accept the plan of Congress. In Tennessee, it is true, the party in control, composed of men who had always been out of sympathy with the mass of the Southern people, welcomed it eagerly. Brownlow, the governor, had already abandoned Johnson as a traitor, and allied himself with the most radical faction of the Republicans in Congress. He at once called the legislature together. The opponents of ratification in the House of Representatives tried to prevent action by staying away and breaking a quorum, but two of the recalcitrants were seized by the Sergeantat-Arms, dragged into a room adjoining the Representatives’ Hall, and counted as present but not voting. The amendment being in this fashion approved, Brownlow telegraphed the Secretary of the Senate at Washington that Tennessee had ratified, and begged to present his respects to “the dead dog in the White House.” Congress, thereupon, in a resolution with a long preamble, declared Tennessee entitled to representation. Johnson signed the resolution, but in a special message refused to endorse the language of the preamble, denying that his own state needed to be “readmitted” into the Union. As it happened, both the Representatives and the two Senators from Tennessee, who had been waiting so long in Washington, were evenly divided between the support of the President and of his opponents. The Senate hesitated over the case of one of the Senators, who was Johnson’s son-in-law; but all were permitted to take their seats before Congress adjourned.

It is easy now to see that the other ten states would have been wise to follow Tennessee’s lead. After admitting Tennessee, Congress would, no doubt, have hesitated to dishonor the claims of the others based on a like compliance with its will. But it is unjust to represent the others as insanely and wickedly rejecting reasonable terms, accompanied by a promise of restoration, and thus forcing Congress to make the terms much harder. Inability to read the future is not madness, nor is it a crime for the conquered to try to profit by a division among the conquerors. Following the debates in Congress, one easily loses sight of the actual state of the people of the South; one does not see the situation with their eyes. Having complied with the terms of peace held out to them by one department of the national government, and finding themselves in bad enough case as it was, they saw neither mercy nor justice in the attempt of another department to impose on them other and harder conditions. On the contrary, they saw in it only hatred and revenge. It would have been remarkable indeed, if, as between Congress and the President, they had not taken sides with the President. When Northern men as astute as Seward, as devoted to human rights as Andrew and Beecher, could see their way to follow Johnson, Southern men, struggling desperately to gain their feet after an immeasurable disaster, humiliated by military rule, exasperated by the peering and intrusive agents of the Treasury and the Freedmen’s Bureau, and catching from his words and acts the first gleam of the hope of deliverance, would have been wise and self-restrained beyond human nature if they had not trusted him rather than his assailants. Moreover, it is again necessary to remember that the radicals, so far from being driven to severity by the obstinacy either of Johnson or of the South, had favored severity from the first, and now probably welcomed an opportunity to go before the country with the claim that moderation had been tried in vain.

Nor had Johnson, by any sign of weakening, given the South an excuse for deserting him. A week after the passage of the Civil Rights Bill over his veto, he proclaimed the insurrection at an end. A fortnight later, addressing a delegation of soldiers and sailors, he hurled another defiance at the radicals. “The President,” wrote Sumner, on April 3, “is angry and brutal.” Vetoing the second Freedmen’s Bureau Bill of the session, he announced that he would faithfully execute the Civil Rights Act while it remained the law, but he stuck firmly to all his old contentions. Having no opportunity to oppose the Fourteenth Amendment, he nevertheless, in a special message, protested against any attempt to alter the Constitution while eleven states had no voice in Congress. He had fallen into Tyler’s error, and believed that he could either build up a new party or reinvigorate and lead to victory the old party to which he had once belonged. Unshaken by his defeats at the hands of Congress, he faced without shrinking disaffection in his own political household. Four of the seven members of the Cabinet had disagreed with him about the Civil Rights Bill, but their opposition had counted as nothing. First Dennison and Harlan, and then Speed, resigned, and he filled their places with men who accepted his views. Stanton, though he sided with Congress, and was in the closest touch with men who were daily assailing his chief, kept his place in the Cabinet. The little that can be learned of his motives indicates that a peculiar sense of responsibility outweighed in his mind considerations of honor and of loyalty that would have controlled almost any other public man in his position. McCulloch, who condemned Stanton for not resigning, held Johnson guilty of a culpable want of spirit in retaining him. The relations of the two soon became difficult in the extreme, yet Johnson kept his disloyal adviser until Congress had passed a law to take away the President’s power of removal, — and then removed him.

Congress adjourned on July 28, and at last the issue between the two plans of Reconstruction, and with it the issue between the legislature and the executive, went to the country. The President asked the people of the North, by their choice of representatives in the next Congress, not only to accept “my policy,” but to restore him the share in legislation of which Congress had virtually deprived him. The majority in Congress asked not merely for approval of the measures it had passed, but for complete control. To win its fight, it must retain a two-thirds majority in both houses. Should the Democrats and Johnson-Republicans united carry one third of the Congress districts, or enough state legislatures to give them one third of the Senate, the President, though still unable to get the ten Southern commonwealths restored to the Union, could hold Congress at bay with the veto, he would continue, by his merely executive authority, to control the actual course of affairs in the South, and he might, by the immense patronage at his disposal, gradually win over enough of the weaker-hearted and the venal among his opponents to bend Congress to his will. Time would be fighting on his side. The North’s bitterness would gradually lessen, as would its fears, and its ardor of sympathy with the freedmen would cool. True, the Thirty-Ninth Congress might, at its short second session, go on passing bills over the veto; but a rebuke at the polls would doubtless make an end of that extraordinary method of legislation. Had Johnson known how to keep the South on its good behavior, to reassure the hesitaters in the North, to inspire confidence among his supporters, to throw Congress on the defensive, and yet avoid, on his own part, all appearance of aggression, — in a word, had he possessed Lincoln’s skill with public opinion, — he might still have saved the cause he had at heart, and perhaps in a measure reëstablished his own sadly damaged prestige. But by a series of mishaps and blunders he quickly lost whatever advantage he had in this peculiar contest.

Two days after the adjournment of Congress, there occurred at New Orleans the most sanguinary of all those “Southern outrages” which filled Northern papers for years after the war. The trouble, it afterwards appeared, had grown out of an extraordinary move of a group of radicals in Louisiana, not improbably inspired from Washington. An attempt had been made to resurrect the convention which had met and adjourned in 1864, in order that it might now enfranchise the freedmen. A procession of negroes, on its way to the convention hall, was set upon by a crowd of whites, who later invaded the hall itself, led by the police, and violently dispersed the convention. The reassembling of that body after two years was a preposterous proceeding, instituted by men who hoped, once they could get an ordinance permitting negroes to vote, to overthrow the existing state government and take control themselves, relying on Congress to sustain them. But Northern people were not disposed to consider explanations and excuses when they learned that the mob and the police had shot down one hundred and fifty-six negroes and twenty white men concerned in the movement, and that both the mob and the police force were made up chiefly of Confederate veterans. The whole affair looked more like a massacre than a riot, and seemed a confirmation of the stories of brutality and injustice to negroes which Sumner and others had for months been spreading before the country. True or false, the accounts of this and other riots in the South proved excellent material for the campaign against the President and his policy.

They went far, no doubt, to counteract the opening move of his friends, — a “National Union” convention, held at Philadelphia in mid-August. In this gathering, the first of four great conventions which marked the unusual character of the canvass, Democrats and Republicans, soldiers of the North and soldiers of the South, mingled in a harmony at which the partisans of Congress jeered, to celebrate a reconciliation of the sections which was likewise ridiculed as premature, precipitate, and insincere. The spectacle of the delegates from the North and the South, Massachusetts and South Carolina in the lead, marching down the aisle in pairs, signified much in which all Americans could rejoice; but to the other side it suggested a nickname for the assemblage, — “the arm-in-arm convention, ”—and a ludicrous comparison with the procession of animals into Noah’s Ark. The proceedings were, in fact, dignified; the resolutions and the address to the country were excellent. But the con vention committed a blunder when it appointed a committee, representing all the states, to wait upon the President. He took the occasion to make a brief but utterly infelicitous speech. Every sentence in it was an indiscretion, but the worst impropriety was a plain implication that, so long as ten states were excluded from representation at the Capitol, he questioned whether the body recently in session there had any right to call itself the Congress. Some even interpreted his words as a threat that he might refuse to recognize Congress as it was constituted, and set up in its stead a body composed of the claimants from the ten excluded states and such Representatives and Senators from other states as might be willing to unite with them.

A fortnight after the National Union convention adjourned, a convention of “Southern Loyalists” assembled at Philadelphia, and was welcomed there by a convention of Northern Republicans. The first assemblage represented but a small part of the white population of the Southern States. Its most striking figure was “Parson” Brownlow, trembling with a palsy, but implacable as ever in his hatred of the Southern Bourbons, and surpassing all rivals in the fierceness of his invective against Johnson. Speed, in the principal speech of the meeting, also made a dramatic attack upon “the tyrant in the White House,” of whose cabinet he had so recently been a member. The convention appealed to the North to protect the loyal men of the South against the President and the unsubdued rebels into whose hands he had delivered them. Instead of punishing traitors, as he had promised, he had, it was declared, established them in power, deserting and ostracizing the faithful adherents of the Union, of whom more than one thousand had been murdered in cold blood since the surrender of Lee. In the Northern convention sat an impressive array of governors, Senators, and other Republican leaders, among them Senator Morgan of New York and Morton, the war governor of Indiana, who had both for a time supported Johnson. There followed two gatherings of men who had fought for the Union, a Johnson convention at Cleveland, made up chiefly of Democrats, but attended by some Republicans of national reputation, and a larger and doubtless more representative convention, opposed to the President’s policy, at Pittsburgh, in which the moving spirit was General B. F. Butler, who thus began, as a violently partisan Republican, a fresh chapter in a career unparalleled for the number and completeness of its political tergiversations. Meanwhile, in every Congressional district in the Northern and the Border states, the contest was waged with a warmth and an intensity of interest surpassing that of most years when a President, as well as a Congress, is to be chosen.

Nor had Johnson, for his part, been idle. The adjournment of Congress had been the signal for a wholesale removal of office-holders known to oppose his policy. “At last, I hev it,” wrote Nasby, early in August; “finally it come.” And whenever thereafter he was tempted to doubt the greatness of Andrew Johnson he needed but to cast a glance at his commission as postmaster at Confedrit X Roads. During the campaign, more than twelve hundred Republican postmasters — many of them, as Republican newspapers did not fail to note, maimed veterans of the Union — lost their official heads. In this,. Johnson did not exceed the license allowed him by the laws of political warfare recognized by his generation. He did, however, soon egregiously violate the well-established usage which forbids a President to engage in ordinary electioneering, and thereby contributed to the canvass its most extraordinary feature.

At the end of August, he left Washington on what was announced as a pilgrimage to attend the laying of the cornerstone of a monument to Stephen A. Douglas at Chicago, but which he converted into a stumping tour after the fashion of his earlier wrestlings with public opinion in Tennessee. Newspapers humorists, seizing on a phrase of his own, called it a “swinging round the circle.” Severer critics called it a disgraceful orgy. All accounts of the campaign agree that for the damage it did the cause it was intended to advance, it surpassed all the efforts of his adversaries.

Seward, Welles, Randall, the new postmaster-general, and General Grant and Admiral Farragut were of the President’s party. Stanton, though invited, had refused to go. Besides Chicago, the itinerary included Philadelphia, New York, Albany, Buffalo, Cleveland, St. Louis, and Indianapolis, with pauses for speechmaking at many Smaller places. Wherever opportunity offered, Johnson spoke, and wherever he spoke he dismayed his friends and delighted his enemies. From egoistic defense of his own acts and motives to personal abuse of his opponents, from tiresomely iterated allusions to “my policy” to utterly undignified controversies with individuals in his audiences, he ran the entire gamut of bad taste, bad judgment, and bad temper in public speech. At Cleveland, where many thought him intoxicated, a crowd he was addressing from a hotel balcony baited him with cries of “How about New Orleans?” “Hang Jeff Davis!” “Traitor!” “Three cheers for Congress!” and the like, to which he responded with equal coarseness. His conduct at St. Louis was even more discreditable, and at Indianapolis the mob actually hooted him into silence. The presence of Grant, whom he had, in fact, forced to accompany him, so far from placating public sentiment, proved a cardinal blunder. “‘Grant!’ ‘Grant!’ they yelled,” Wrote Nasby, describing one of the meetings, “and the more the President showed hisself, the more they yelled ‘Grant!’” And again: “The train was off amid loud shouts of ‘Grant!’ ‘Grant!’ to wich the President responded by wavin’ his hat.” The pen of Nasby and the pencil of Nast, unsparingly as they portrayed the ludicrous and humiliating failure of the tour, hardly exaggerated the effect of it on the public mind. The disgust of the country with a President who had so little sense of the demeanor his great office required of him was immeasurable. That the North should deny its confidence to a man so incapable of self-control was not unreasonable, and may not have been unjust. But the distrust and dislike of the President extended to all who stood with him and to all that he and they stood for. Seward never recovered while he lived the popularity he lost by his part in the business. A heightening impatience with the South displayed itself in various signs of a growth of the sentiment in favor of forcing the grant of suffrage to the freedmen. The President’s hope of forming a new party swiftly evaporated. He was left alone with the Democrats and a handful of Republicans who could not desert him without self-stultification, while within the Republican party the drift was unmistakably toward the radical leaders and programme.

Maine and Vermont, the two “September states,” both went heavily Republican. After the second Tuesday in October, when Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Iowa, the four “October states,” all likewise gave majorities against the Democratic and Johnson-Republican candidates, no one could be in doubt of the outcome. In November, such of the former Confederate states as held any elections went Democratic, as did Maryland, Delaware, and Kentucky; but the entire North, with West Virginia and Missouri, voted an approval of Congress and a rebuke to the President. Republicans opposed to “my policy” carried one hundred and forty-three out of one hundred and ninety-two seats in the House of Representatives, and it was seen that they would have a safe two-thirds majority in the Senate.

The verdict was as decisive as the issue had been clear. The North declined, as Congress had declined, to ratify the terms which Lincoln and Johnson had offered to the South. As the South, on the other hand, Tennessee apart, had refused to comply with the conditions imposed by Congress, — a course which Johnson, even after the election, stubbornly continued to advise, — nothing hindered Congress at its second session from undoing all the two presidents had done and beginning afresh with the entire problem. The two men to whom the election brought the fullest sense of triumph were, therefore, not Fessenden and Trumbull, the chief sponsors for the acts of the first session, but Sumner and Stevens.

Once more, in the long wrestling of the nation with the burden of the fate of the African, the spirit of Abolitionism, the spirit of “thorough,” was to prevail over the spirit of moderation and compromise. The South lay at the mercy of the radical Republicans in Congress, — men who could find no remedy for the injustices of her social system short of giving the political power into the hands of an ignorant horde of newly-freed slaves. It is no wonder that at the prospect the Southern people sank into dejection even deeper than that which had followed Appomattox. They had known for a year the hope deferred that maketh the heart sick, and now came that hope’s denial. The failure of the year’s crops added immediate distress to the gloom of the outlook.

But in the illogical and confusing course of human affairs we may sometimes note curiously coincidental balancing of forces, pairing of tendencies, parallelisms of trains of events. During the summer and autumn of 1865, while the white South watched the overthrow of its blundering champion, and the black South saw the day swiftly approaching when the “bottom rail” should be “on top,” the negroes of a certain neighborhood in Tennessee — a state in which the whites of the ruling class already endured, under Brownlow, such contumelies as were in store for their brethren in other states — began to be troubled with apparitions. By the time the Thirty-Ninth Congress had assembled and set to work on the measures that should make an end of all inequality between the races, the area of these ghostly visitations had greatly widened. Strange stories began to be

circulated among the blacks about a new kind of ghouls or demons called “Ku Klux.” Before the day came when political power was reft from the white citizens of all the states from the Potomac to the Rio Grande, the more dauntlessly masterful among them, meeting force with guile, had already found refuge in an invisible empire.