A HISTORY

OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE

CHAPTER I

RECONSTRUCTION

MR. LINCOLN's' death made Mr. Johnson President. The first tasks of peace were to be hardly less difficult than the tasks of war had been; and the party which had triumphed was left without executive leadership at their very beginning. Mr. Johnson was a man who, like Mr. Lincoln himself, had risen from very humble origins to posts of trust and distinction; but his coarse fibre had taken no polish, no refinement in the process. He stopped neither to understand nor to persuade other men, but struck forward with crude, uncompromising force for his object, attempting mastery without wisdom or moderation. Wisdom of no common order was called for in the tasks immediately before him. What effect had the war wrought upon the federal system? What was now the status of the States which had attempted secession and been brought to terms only by two million armed men sent into the field and the pouring out of blood and treasure beyond all reckoning? Were they again States of the Union, or had they forfeited their

statehood and become conquered provinces merely, to be dealt with at the will of Congress? If conquered possessions, how and when were they to be made States once more and the old federal circle restored in its integrity? Mr. Lincoln had made up his mind upon these points with characteristic directness and simplicity. So long ago as December, 1863, he had issued a proclamation of amnesty' in which he had treated secession as a rebellion of individuals, not of States, and had offered full forgetfulness and the restoration of property and of citizenship to all who should take oath to "support, protect, and defend the constitution of the United States and the union of the States thereunder," and respect the action of the federal government in the emancipation of the slaves. Some classes of persons he excepted from the amnesty: those who had taken a prominent and official part in secession or who had left the service of the United States for the service of the Confederacy; but he invited those who would take the oath proposed to set up governments once more and make ready to take part as of old in the federal system, though they should number but one tenth of the voters of 1860. The qualified voters of Arkansas, Louisiana, and Tennessee had accepted these terms before the war ended. Mr. Lincoln had fulfilled his promise to them and given full recognition to the new governments they set up, so far as the Executive was concerned, as once more in their places in the Union. He did not stop to discuss the question of the lawyers, whether these States had been all the while in the Union, despite their attempts at secession and their acts of war against the federal government, or had for a time been out of it; and declared that he thought that

merely an abstract inquiry, a question practically immaterial. "We all agree that the seceded States, so called, are out of their proper practical relation with the Union," he said, "and that the sole object of the government, civil and military, in regard to those States is to again get them into that proper practical relation. I believe that it is not only possible, but in fact easier, to do this without deciding or even considering whether these States have been out of the Union, than with it. Finding themselves safely at home, it would be utterly immaterial whether they had ever been abroad."

But Congress had not acquiesced in Mr. Lincoln's policy. Mr. Lincoln had been too much inclined, it seemed to the leaders of the houses, to regard the restoration of the southern States to their "proper practical relation to the Union" as a matter to be settled by the action of the Executive. The constitution made each house the sole judge of the validity of elections to its membership: Congress was at liberty, should it choose, to exclude all southern members until it should itself be satisfied with the process by which the States they claimed to represent had been re-established upon their old footing; and the temper of the congressional leaders had grown more and more radical as the fortunes of war had turned their doubt into hope, their hope into triumphant confidence. At first they had been puzzled how to read the law of the constitution in so unprecedented a matter; but each victory in arms had seemed to them to make it less necessary that they should read it with subtlety. Success seemed to clear the way for other considerations, of plainer dictate than the law of the constitution. Turn the matter this way or that, it seemed mere weakness to accord the southern

States their old place in the Union without exacting of them something more than mere submission. Should their social system be left untouched, their old life and power given back to them to be used as before for the perpetuation of political beliefs and domestic institutions which had in fact lain at the heart of the war? Opinion slowly gathered head to prevent any such course. Something should be demanded of them which should make them like the rest of the Union, not in allegiance merely, but in principle and practice as well.

Mr. Lincoln had himself made it a condition precedent to his recognition of the re-established liberties and allegiance of those southerners whom he was ready to permit to bring their States into proper practical relation with the Union again that the laws of the rehabilitated governments should "recognize and declare the permanent freedom" of the negroes and provide for their education; no one, North or South, dreamed that slavery was to be set up again. But every man mistook his feeling for principle in that day of heat, and Mr. Lincoln's cool, judicial tone and purpose in affairs was deeply disquieting to all who loved drastic action. The solemn, sweet-tempered sentences with which his second inaugural address1 had closed seemed themselves of bad omen to high-strung men. "With malice towards none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations." In the proclamation in which he had called upon all who were willing to return to their allegiance in the South to reconstruct their govern