9 President Andrew Johnson: Tribune of States’ Rights H. Arthur Scott Trask and Carey Roberts

During the first half of the twentieth century, most American historians regarded Andrew Johnson as a courageous and strong-willed politician who defended the prerogatives and independent position of the presidency from a usurping Congress. Defenders of the imperial presidency saw in Johnson a strong leader. If Johnson had not resisted the attempt of the Radical Republicans in Congress to create a congressional system of government, so the thinking ran, the presidency may never have reached the heights of power and leadership that it attained under Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Roosevelt. In addition, historians praised Johnson for resisting what was regarded, even in the North, as the shameful period of congressional Reconstruction.

Beginning as early as the 1890s, the consensus opinion in the North began to regard their attempt to “reconstruct” the Southern states as an unnecessary, vengeful, misguided, and corrupt enterprise. In the latter half of the century, the perspective changed somewhat. Race-obsessed American historians began to condemn Johnson as a narrow-minded fool who obstructed the noble experiment of congressional Reconstruction. If only Johnson had cooperated with, instead of fighting, the efforts of Republicans to reconstruct the South, then America’s “unfinished revolution” would have been completed well before 1900. At the same time, presidential historians continued to respect Johnson for his courageous stand on behalf of the prerogatives of the presidency.

Our view rejects both positions. We see Johnson as an unlikely hero for liberty during his presidency. Unlikely, because he supported the Northern war to coerce the Southern states back into the Union, and he served the president who dealt a series of hammer blows to the federal constitutional order from which it has never recovered. As such, Johnson was an accomplice and abettor of the man and party who killed America’s great heritage of constitutional and federative liberty. Yet in the aftermath of that war, Johnson set himself in the path of those who intended to complete and institutionalize the statist revolution inaugurated by Lincoln. Johnson was not a forerunner of the modern imperial president who views his office as the ideal ground from which to transform the polity from the top down. Rather, Johnson the president acted more like a tribune whose duty was to defend the liberties and laws of the land from the usurpations of other branches of government. He thus employed the veto power as a conservative, constraining force upon the excesses of a vindictive and revolutionary Northern majority.

Andrew Johnson was born in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1808. As a young man, he worked as a tailor in Greenville, Tennessee. He began his political career in east Tennessee, climbing the ladder from alderman (1828–1830) to mayor (1830–1833) to state representative (1835–1837; 1839–1841), to state senator (1841–1843). In 1842, he was elected to the U.S. Congress, where he served six terms; he was elected governor of Tennessee in 1852, where he served until 1857; and he was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1856, where he served until 1862.

In politics, Johnson was a Jacksonian Democrat. As such, he opposed the Whig economic program of high tariffs, federal subsidies for internal improvements, and a national bank. Also typical of many Jacksonians, he defended the institution of slavery and consistently supported proslavery legislation (the fugitive slave law, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, etc.) in Congress. Like Andrew Jackson, he was a states’-rights nationalist, which means that while he believed in preserving the rights of the states, he denied the state remedies of nullification (state veto) and secession. As many Jeffersonians of the time pointed out, and as experience was to confirm, this was a fatal concession to federal power, for without some means of preserving states’ rights, they were vulnerable to the encroachments of the federal authority.

From the perspective of state politics, Johnson was regarded as a spokesman for the yeomanry and poor whites of Tennessee. He did not represent the interests of the planters, most of whom were Whigs, nor did he associate with them socially or politically. Not surprisingly, when Tennessee withdrew from the Union in June 1861, Johnson refused to go with his state. He was the only Southern senator not to resign his seat. His decision was influenced both by his humble background and his nationalist principles. In March 1862, Lincoln appointed Johnson military governor of Tennessee, and, in 1864, chose him to be his running mate on the “National Union,” or Union-Republican, ticket. By choosing a Southerner and an ex-Democrat (Johnson switched parties during the war) as his running mate, Lincoln angered the Republican leaders. But Lincoln was already looking toward reuniting the country after the war. As the historian Otto Scott observed, Lincoln believed that a Northern victory would settle the vexing questions of secession and slavery, but nothing more. Once the war was over and those two issues were settled, “the nation should resume its normal patterns.”[1]

Like other conservative Whigs and Democrats who decided to support “the war for the Union,” Johnson was no radical, and he had no intention of helping to bring about a constitutional revolution or perpetuating Republican control over the national government. He honestly believed that the war could be limited to the conservative end of reuniting the states on the old federal basis. In July of 1861, Senator Johnson introduced a resolution, soon passed by the Senate, which explained Northern war aims:

This war is not prosecuted upon our part in any spirit of oppression, nor for any purpose of conquest or subjugation, nor for the purpose of overthrowing or interfering with the rights or established institutions of those States, but to defend and maintain the supremacy of the Constitution and all laws made in pursuance thereof, and to preserve the Union, with all the dignity, equality, and rights of the several States unimpaired; that as soon as these objects are accomplished the war ought to cease.[2]

Thousands of Northerners enlisted in the army and fought bravely on the grounds that they were fighting to preserve the Union, nothing more. In retrospect, Johnson’s belief that the Union could be restored on the old basis after the secession of eleven states and a war of coercion to bring them back to federal allegiance appears naive at best. Like many other conservative Unionists, he failed to see that military coercion was incompatible with the federated and consensual character of the Union formed in 1788, and that to wage a war of subjugation was to wage war upon the same principles of self-determination and self-government upon which a previous generation of Americans had fought the British Crown. War always brings with it fundamental, unforeseen, and often revolutionary changes in the body politic, and the Republican leaders were not going to voluntarily relinquish their political power and their economic policies upon the cessation of hostilities. From its inception in 1854, the Republican Party had been the political expression of the will-to-power of Northern capital. What Northern bankers, manufacturers, and investors wanted was a close partnership between themselves and the federal government in which the revenue, power, and resources of the latter would be put to work to further the interests of the former. The Republican victory in 1860, in which the party captured not only the presidency but both houses of Congress, promised them a feast of long-awaited sweets—a protective tariff, a national bank, a national paper currency, and federal subsidies for railroads and other internal improvements. The unexpected secession of the seven states of the lower South threatened to deprive them of the fruits of their long-awaited political victory, for it meant both a drastic reduction in federal tariff revenue (most of which was paid by the cotton-exporting states) and the loss of the Southern market for their manufactures. When the Northern states slipped into economic depression during “the secession winter” (1860–1861), the business community threw its support behind war to restore the Union.

The War Between the States is a classic case of Clausewitz’s dictum that war is the continuation of politics by other means. Johnson simply lacked the political insight or genius to recognize the deeper meaning of the war. He was not alone. Even the brilliant Northern writer Orestes Brownson supported the Northern war effort because he believed it was “a war in defense of government, of authority, and the supremacy of law. It is a war in vindication of national integrity, and in defense of American constitutionalism.”[3] Only in retrospect did Brownson realize that the war had been

a struggle of interests. The abolition fanatics were only the fly on the wheel, and the question they raised amounted to nothing in itself, and it was of importance only as it was seized upon as a pretext, and had only this significance, that the business interests of the North could subject the interests of the South to their control only by destroying the southern capital invested in labor.[4]

Despite his radicalism and contempt for constitutional limitations, Lincoln wanted to restore the Southern states to their previous status as full and equal members of the Union with only a minimum of conditions—loyalty oaths, requests for presidential pardons from high-ranking Confederate officers and officials, repudiation of the Confederate war debt, and ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment. Lincoln decided to pursue such a policy based on three considerations. First, he believed that a statesman should be magnanimous and generous in victory. (See his Second Inaugural Address.) Second, he feared the possibility of a long, drawn-out guerrilla war between ex-Confederates and Northern troops if the government were to impose harsh peace terms. Third, he hoped to rebuild the antebellum Whig coalition of Northern businessmen and Southern planters under the banner of the Republican Party.

Lincoln was as dedicated as any Radical to assuring the political ascendancy of the Republican Party and to maintaining the mercantilist national economic policies favored by the party. However, he disagreed with the Radicals on the proper strategy to follow to achieve these goals. The Radicals wanted to disenfranchise Southern whites and enfranchise Southern blacks; Lincoln wanted to enlist the Southern gentry in the Republican Party. As the war drew to a close in the spring of 1865, Lincoln showed unmistakable signs that he intended to abide by a generous policy of restoration, rather than reconstruction.

In a speech just a few days before his assassination, Lincoln explained that “the sole object of the government, civil and military, in regard to those States,” is to get them back into “their proper practical relation with the Union.”[5] With regard to the state government of Louisiana, which he had already recognized, “the question is not whether the Louisiana government, as it stands, is quite all that is desirable. The question is, will it be wiser to take it as it is and help to improve it, or to reject and disperse it?”[6] The day before he was shot, he told Gideon Welles, his secretary of the Navy, that “civil government [in the South] must be reestablished as soon as possible—there must be courts, and law, and order, or society would be broken up—the disbanded armies would turn into robber bands and guerrillas.”[7] During a cabinet meeting the same day, he expressed his belief that it was “providential” that “the rebellion” had been subdued just as Congress had adjourned for the summer, thus giving them time to carry out a restoration policy without “the disturbing elements of that body to hinder and embarrass us.”[8] He hoped to “reanimate the States and get their governments in successful operation, with order prevailing and the Union reestablished, before Congress came together in December.” Referring to the Republican Radicals in Congress,

there was too much of a desire on the part of some of our good friends to be masters, to interfere with and dictate to those States, to treat the people not as fellow citizens; there was too little respect for their rights. He did not sympathize in these feelings.[9]

Lincoln hoped to restore the Union by December 1865, with functioning state governments and full political rights for ex-Confederates, and so present the Radical leaders with a fait accompli. Lincoln for the first time in his political life was acting the part of a statesman, and the Radicals did not like it. Thaddeus Stevens wrote fellow Radical Charles Sumner to complain that “the president is precipitating things. . . . I fear before Congress meets he will have so be-deviled matters as to render them incurable.” In a later letter, he cried out “Is there no way to arrest the insane course of the president? . . . If something is not done the president will be crowned king before Congress meets.”[10]

Not surprisingly, Republican leaders in Congress reacted to the news of President Lincoln’s assassination with a mixture of shock and elation. Many of them regarded it as an act of providence. B. Gratz Brown, a Radical leader from Missouri, wrote Johnson to express his belief that “God in His providence has called you to complete the work of rebuilding this nation that it might be stamped with radical democracy in all its parts.”[11] What they meant was that now that Lincoln had fulfilled his mission of saving the union, it was up to firmer hands (Johnson’s) to secure the blessings of victory (i.e., spoils). The Radicals had regarded Lincoln’s policy both as too lenient and as politically suicidal. They feared that to readmit Southern representatives and senators to Congress would be to throw away the well-deserved fruits of victory at the very moment when they were to be enjoyed in peace and security. Thaddeus Stevens (R-Penn.) told Confederate General Richard Taylor a few weeks after the end of the war that “the white people of the South ought never again to be trusted with power, for they would inevitably unite with the Northern Copperheads and control the government.”[12] The Republican leadership understood that their party did not yet command majority support in the country and that few Southerners were going to want to join forces with the party of abolition and military coercion. On these matters, they probably were being more realistic than the president. What is more, many Radicals hoped to make money in the South after the war. The restoration of home rule in the South would mean considerably fewer opportunities to profit from the prostration of the Southern economy, for Southerners would be less than friendly to Yankee efforts to buy up their plantations and natural resources and establish an economic thralldom over them.

However, the Radicals erred in assuming that Johnson shared their desire to impose harsher terms upon “the rebels” or that at least he would not stand in their way. When Johnson took office after Lincoln’s assassination, he at first appeared to be on their side. He spoke of hanging the chief “traitors” and even ordered the arrest of Robert E. Lee, the latter of which was prevented only by the timely protest and intervention of General Grant. However, after Johnson’s passions had cooled, he decided to follow the basic lines of Lincoln’s policy. In early May, he recognized the legitimacy of the provisional state governments set up by Lincoln in Louisiana, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Virginia. On May 29, he announced two proclamations. The first granted a general pardon to all Confederates who agreed to take an oath of allegiance to the union; only high-ranking officers and officials were excluded. The president invited the latter group to apply for special pardons from the executive branch. In the next six months, Johnson issued more than 13,500 of these pardons.

The second proclamation that Johnson issued laid down the procedures and conditions to be followed in order to obtain executive recognition of state governments in the seven remaining Southern states. A provisional governor appointed by the president was empowered to call a state convention to frame a new constitution. All ex-Confederates who had been pardoned were eligible to vote or serve as delegates. Johnson expected the conventions to abolish slavery, revoke their secession ordinances, and repudiate the Confederate war debt (both confederate and state). Johnson did not consider granting black suffrage as a condition for restoration, for that was a “power the people of the several States have rightfully exercised from the origin of the Government to the present time.” Johnson’s restoration policy became known as the North Carolina Plan. In the next six months, state conventions met in six of the seven unreconstructed states. (Texas’s convention did not meet until March 1866.) Every state convention abolished slavery. Every one except South Carolina declared their secession ordinances to be null and void; South Carolina merely repealed its ordinance. Every convention except South Carolina and Mississippi repudiated the state debt incurred during the war. The conventions also provided for the election of state legislators, executive officials, and judges. The new state legislatures promptly ratified the Thirteenth Amendment (Mississippi excepted), chose U.S. senators, and provided for the election of federal representatives. By the time Congress convened in early December 1865, Johnson’s conditions had been fulfilled in every state but two, and substantially fulfilled in those two states; and every Southern state except Texas had sent a delegation to Congress. All that was necessary to complete the process of political restoration and reunification was for Congress to seat the new members. In his first annual message on December 5, 1865, Johnson declared that the Union had been practically restored and that the revived Southern states were entitled to representation. He urged Congress to promptly admit them.

The Republican leadership, however, never considered recognizing the newly established governments or seating the Southern representatives. Even before Congress reconvened, Republican leaders met to plan strategy. They decided to form a special congressional committee to take over Reconstruction policy from the president and to refuse to seat any Southern representatives. When Congress assembled on December 6, they named a Joint Committee of Fifteen, ostensibly to determine whether the Southern states were “entitled to be represented in either House of Congress” but actually to formulate their own Southern policy. House leaders moved to excise the names of Southern representatives from the congressional rolls, and the Senate refused to hear the reading of the credentials of the Southern senators. They even refused to recognize or seat representatives and senators from Lincoln’s loyalist governments set up during the war, even though they had been voting in Congress! The meaning was clear: The president’s program was out, and a congressional plan was to take its place. Another deeper meaning was also clear, at least to astute Northern Democrats and Southerners: There had been a third war aim, unannounced but real. Otto Scott’s induction hits the nail on the head: “To win that war, and to then refuse to allow the South to remain in the Union was not only logically perverse, but a tacit admission that the war had not been about slavery, but—as in all and every war—power.”[13]

On December 18, 1865, Representative Thaddeus Stevens rose in the House to declare the intentions of the Republican leadership. The president’s plan was null and void. According to Stevens, the Southern states were no longer states, but were “conquered provinces,” and they were no longer in the Union. Since they were out of the Union they could only be readmitted by joint action of the president and Congress. Now that the war was over, Stevens and the Republican Party were changing the rules. The Northern states had carried on the war on the theory that the Southern states had not seceded but had rebelled and hence were simply out “of their proper relations” with the federal government and the other states. Taking this theory at face value, Southerners assumed that once they accepted the verdict of the war—no secession or slavery—they could resume their place as equal states in the Union. But now that the war was over, Stevens was saying that the Southern states were out of the Union, that they had no political rights at all, and that they were going to be “reconstructed” by the Republicans.[14] Stevens declared that the Southern states should be readmitted only after they had “learn[ed] the principles of freedom, and eat[en] the fruits of foul rebellion.” For Stevens and his ilk, unconditional surrender, the physical devastation of the South, and the death of one-third of Southern white males was not enough of a lesson. Stevens’s speech is an example of the deep-seated moral self-righteousness of the Republicans of this period. In a postwar speech, Thaddeus Stevens exclaimed:

What! Six millions of Rebels who had renounced the Constitution, who had murdered five hundred thousand of our citizens, who had loaded the nation with debt and drenched it with blood, when conquered had forfeited no right, had lost no jurisdiction or civil authority.[15]

For the Radicals, restoration of the Union on Johnson’s terms was simply not enough. The South had to be made to pay for their “treason” and remade in the image of New England. Belief in the unmitigated evil of the other seems to have fulfilled some deep psychological or religious need of the Northern majority. The demonization of the South also provided a handy moral cover and rationalization for the numerous war crimes (arson, systematic theft, rape) committed by Northern troops as they rampaged through the South, as well as for what the Republicans had in store for the postwar South—namely political subordination and economic exploitation.

The Republicans realized that restoration of the Union on Lincoln’s and Johnson’s terms in 1865 would have meant their fall from national power sooner or later, perhaps as early as the fall elections of 1866. The loss of their congressional majority—and, in 1868, the presidency—meant not only the loss of lucrative political offices at the federal level but the dismantling of their neo-mercantilist economic program. A resurgent Democratic Party would reduce the tariff, curb federal railroad subsidies, decrease federal expenditures, begin retiring the national debt, and move the country back to a hard-money standard. Johnson’s annual message only confirmed these fears with its Jacksonian overtones and themes. To them it was confirmation, if they needed any at that point, that Johnson had gone over to the Democratic enemy.

Johnson described the federal debt “as a heavy burden on the industry of the country” which should “be discharged without unnecessary delay.”[16] To effect this objective, he called for the immediate adoption of a program of debt reduction designed to “discharge it fully within a definitely fixed number of years.”[17] Such a policy was anathema to Republicans. Not only did federal bonds form a profitable part of the investment portfolio of many Republicans both in and out of Congress, but the Republicans had used the bonds to capitalize both the railroads and the new national banks. Rapid retirement would bring ruin to these debt-financed enterprises. Just as much an anathema were Johnson’s call for diminishing the amount of federal paper money in circulation, probably through the retirement of greenbacks, and his suggestion that the tariff be “adjusted as to fall most heavily on articles of luxury, leaving the necessaries of life as free from taxation as the absolute wants of the Government economically administered will justify.”[18] Johnson’s adjustment policy was a subtle way of calling for reductions in the duties most favored by the textile and iron magnates who were the real power in the Republican Party.

His call for currency deflation threatened the huge profits being made by Republican national bankers and investment houses. Although the Republicans were less than candid in declaring their true motives in public, they were not so in private. General Beckwith of Massachusetts wrote Charles Sumner that they had “better let Louisiana, Arkansas, and Tennessee, all wait for years than let in a single state or man not permanently reliable for the support of the right policy.”[19] Another Bostonian wrote Edwin Stanton, “We have them now under a control which we must not lose, even if we hold them as military dependencies.”[20]

It is necessary to demolish a series of historical myths that have persisted to this day, which blamed the South for “the necessity” of congressional Reconstruction. According to this argument, the South refused to accept the end of slavery and so crafted a series of “black codes” designed to re-enslave the blacks in all but in name, and violent and vengeful Southerners began the wanton murder and lynchings of blacks all across the South. Under these circumstances, restoration of home-rule to the South was out of the question. Congress, led by the Republican Party, was morally obligated to intercede to protect the lives and liberty of the freedmen by assuming direct rule over the Southern states and instituting fundamental changes. Let us examine these charges, beginning with the slavery issue. The evidence that can be gleaned from Southern diaries, letters, and published writings is overwhelming that, once the war was over, Southerners were glad to be done with slavery. Slavery had brought many benefits, but it had also entailed huge responsibilities. Richard Taylor explained the attitude of his fellow Southerners after the surrender: “extinction of slavery was expected by all and regretted by none.”[21]

The second historical myth was the black codes. The first black codes were passed by the legislature of Mississippi in the late fall of 1865, and other states followed. Although the codes varied from state to state, there were common elements. Most granted, or recognized, important legal rights for the freedmen, such as the right to hold property, to marry, to make contracts, to sue, and to testify in court. Many mandated penalties for vagrancy, but the intention there was not to bind them to the land in a state of perpetual serfdom, as was charged by Northern Radicals, but to end what had become an intolerable situation—the wandering across the South of large numbers of freedmen who were without food, money, jobs, or homes. Such a situation was leading to crime, fear, and violence. Other provisions, found in some of the state codes, excluded freedmen from jury duty, mandated segregation in public facilities, and required freedmen to obtain licenses before doing certain kinds of work.

The question is not whether the passage of certain legal disabilities was just or right, but whether their passage justified the action of Congress in refusing to seat Southern delegates to Congress. There are reasons to doubt that they did constitute such a justification. First, the Constitution did not grant the federal government any authority or jurisdiction over questions of civil rights within the various states. Second, many of the legal disabilities contained in “the black codes” were already in existence in the Northern states (such as denial of jury duty). For Northerners to cite them as justification for denying Southerners their right to federal representation was gross hypocrisy. Third, the weakness of the Radicals’ case can be seen in their failure to calmly explain the specific injustices of the codes. Instead of doing so, Republican newspapers and politicians systematically misrepresented them, or denounced them in toto, to a gullible Northern public eager to believe the worst about the South.

Another myth was racial violence. It was simply not true that the postwar South was convulsed with white violence against blacks. After surveying the many reports made by Northern officers, businessmen, and commissioners, the historian Howard Beale concluded that “a preponderance of trustworthy opinion expressed to Johnson was sanguine about Southern conditions.”[22] Most reported that Southerners had accepted the results of the war, were ready to do justice to the freedmen, and wanted to rebuild their country and resume their place in the Union. Even Generals Grant and Sherman told Johnson that the South was loyal and deserved immediate restoration.[23] The problem was that the Republicans, who had no interest in reconciliation or restoration, were citing the reports of officers and businessmen that claimed the opposite of what Johnson was hearing—that Southerners were bent on revenge and mayhem. Beale explains these negative reports as stemming from a combination of ignorance, or misunderstanding, of Southern conditions by Northerners with little experience or sympathy for the South, and distortions, and in many cases outright fabrications, of events by those who either had ideological obsessions or interests to gratify. Of course racial violence occurred in the South, but both races contributed to it; and it was unreasonable to expect that there would be no violence in the aftermath of a bitter and destructive civil war that overthrew traditional social relations and resulted in so much death and destruction. In fact, considering the circumstances, one wonders why there was so little violence.

The postwar North was hardly immune from violent conflict between labor and capital. There even is evidence that Republican leaders tried to provoke violence to create a pretext for keeping Southerners out of Congress. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, who was secretly working with the Radical leaders, kept armed garrisons of black soldiers posted throughout the South for more than a year after the war was over. Such a policy was dictated partly by vengeance—a desire to humiliate Southerners and rub their noses in the fruit of their “rebellion”—and partly by the expectation that racial violence might result which could be used for Republican political advantage.

In the Memphis race riot of May 1866, Stanton’s policy of provocation bore its bitter fruit. The situation in Memphis was volatile. First, there was a garrison of four thousand black soldiers located on the outskirts of town. Many of the troops held up white citizens at gunpoint, while others made it a practice of insulting whites, jostling them on the sidewalk, or stopping them for searches. At the same time, thousands of blacks from the countryside had flocked into the city after the war, where they began competing for jobs with a large number of recently arrived Irish immigrants. In addition, as a consequence of the Northern occupation, Irish immigrants came to hold the municipal office and to constitute much of the police force. When some discharged black soldiers threw stones at police officers attempting to break up a fight, a riot broke out that soon degenerated into a systematic attack upon the black quarter by Irish police and laboring men. The riot resulted in forty-eight deaths (mostly black), three rapes, and the destruction of hundreds of buildings.[24] The important point is that Southerners were not even involved in this race riot. The obvious lesson was not that Southerners could not be trusted with self-government but that armed black garrisons were a bad idea and that Southerners, not recently arrived Irish immigrants, should be in charge of city governments in the South.

The New Orleans race riot of late July 1866 offered further proof of the role of the Republicans in provoking race violence in the South. Under Johnson’s plan, Southerners were slowly resuming control of their state. By the summer, pardoned Confederates had elected a state legislature, state executive officers, and a mayor for New Orleans; it was only a matter of time before the Republicans lost control of the office of governor and hence of all political power. The Republicans in the state decided to act before it was too late. They issued a call for the reconvening of the 1864 state convention for the purpose of amending the state constitution and holding new elections. Only those who had been eligible to vote in 1864 could vote for delegates to the new convention. The Radical delegates planned on canceling the previous state elections that had resulted in Democratic victories; disenfranchising most ex-Confederates; and enfranchising the blacks.

When President Johnson heard of these proceedings, he immediately wrote Governor Wells, asking him on what authority had the convention been called and pointing out that a convention that did not represent the qualified voters of the state, which this did not, had no legal standing. The governor ignored him. What the Radicals were doing was not simply illegal; it was revolutionary. They were actually attempting to overthrow the legally-elected state government and institute new government controlled by themselves.

Outraged, the mayor of the city and the lieutenant governor of the state asked General Baird, who was commanding Federal forces in the city, for permission to disperse the convention and arrest its key leaders. Baird refused permission or assistance and offered only to protect the convention from mob action. On the Friday night previous to the Monday convention, the Radicals held a mass meeting at which they denounced President Johnson, urged blacks to arm themselves, and warned that if the city authorities attempted to prevent or break up the convention, “the streets will run with blood.” General Baird immediately telegraphed the president, asking him for instructions on what to do. Given Johnson’s opinion that the convention was an illegal and revolutionary gathering, there is no doubt he would have ordered Baird to assist the city authorities in suppressing the convention. He himself admitted a few days later that he would have so acted. But Johnson did not receive the telegram until after the riot was over. Why? Secretary Stanton deliberately withheld it from him. Not surprisingly the convening of the convention was met by violence as city police and some civilians attacked the delegates and their black supporters. The violence did not last long, but close to fifty persons were killed, most of them black.[25]

As news of the riot reached the North, the Republican press, pulpit, and stump erupted in inflammatory denunciations of Southern wickedness, murder, mayhem, and continued rebelliousness. As Richard Taylor so aptly put it, “the radicals . . . rejoiced as Torquemada might have done when the discovery of score of heretics furnished him an excuse to torment and destroy a province.”[26] In a typical statement, The Chicago Tribune reported that “the hands of the Rebels are again red with loyal blood; rebel armies have once again begun the work of massacre.”[27]

Republicans made liberal use of the Memphis and New Orleans riots in the fall election campaign to persuade Northern voters that the South was not yet deserving of self-rule or congressional representation, and that the military occupation would have to continue until Southerners were duly punished, the blacks were protected, and Southern society was transformed. Thaddeus Stevens thundered:

Behold the awful slaughter of white men and black—of a Convention of highly respectable men, peaceably assembled in New Orleans, which General Sheridan pronounces more horrible than the massacre of Fort Pillow. Even the clergyman who opened the proceedings with prayer was cruelly murdered. All this was done under the sanction of Johnson and his office-holders. It is the legitimate consequence of his policy.[28]

In other words, if the Southerners were allowed their freedom, this was how they would behave. It is hardly just to blame the white people of New Orleans for the violent acts committed by a few dozen undisciplined policemen and some armed roughs in response to deliberate provocation and goading from Radical leaders. Taylor himself explained that most Southerners in the city disapproved of the violence employed by the police, “were indignant” at reports that some blacks had been wantonly killed, and expected that the regular civil authorities would punish those guilty of murder or of violence not committed in self-defense.[29] Yet all three agencies of Northern opinion—the press, the pulpit, and the legislative hall—blew the riots out of proportion and systematically misrepresented the facts, for they furnished proof for those already disposed to believe it that the South was unrepentant and in need of further chastisement.

The first major act of congressional Reconstruction was the passage of the Freedmen’s Bureau Bill (February 1866). This bill authorized significant land confiscation and redistribution, social-welfare programs, and the setting up of extra-constitutional military courts for the protection of the “civil rights” of freedmen. Johnson vetoed the bill on the grounds of its gross unconstitutionality and centralizing character. The bill empowered the bureau to distribute in forty-acre plots up to three million acres of land in five Southern states to freedmen for rent with an option to buy. Johnson pointed out that this measure confiscated land “without any legal proceedings being first had.”[30] The bill made the bureau a welfare agency with the power to start up and administer schools, to distribute free food and clothing to the freedmen, and to provide money by which the freedmen could pay rent for the lands they had been awarded. Johnson condemned the bill because:

The Congress of the United States has never heretofore thought itself empowered to establish asylums beyond the limits of the District of Columbia, except for the benefit of our disabled soldiers and sailors. It has never founded schools for any class of our own people, not even for the orphans of those who have fallen in the defense of the Union, but has left the care of education to the much more competent and efficient control of the states, or communities, of private associations, and of individuals. It has never deemed itself authorized to expend the public money for the rent or purchase of homes for thousands, not to say millions, of the white race who are honestly toiling from day to day for their subsistence. A system for the support of indigent persons in the United States was never contemplated by the authors of the Constitution; nor can any good reason be advanced why, as a permanent establishment, it should be founded on one class or color of our people more than another. . . .The idea on which the slaves were assisted to freedom was that on becoming free they would be a self-sustaining population. Any legislation that shall imply that they are not expected to attain a self-sustaining condition must have a tendency injurious alike to their character and their prospects. . . . Neither is sufficient consideration given to the ability of the freedmen to protect and take care of themselves. It is no more than justice to them to believe that as they have received their freedom with moderation and forbearance, so they will distinguish themselves by their industry and thrift, and soon show the world that in a condition of freedom they are self-sustaining, capable of selecting their own employment and their own places of abode, of insisting for themselves on a proper remuneration, and of establishing and maintaining their own asylums and schools. . . . It is certain that they can attain to that condition only through their own merits and exertions.[31]

While Johnson’s criticism speaks for itself, three of his chief points should be emphasized. First, the adoption of such powers by the federal government was both unprecedented and unconstitutional and took it into areas that it was not competent to manage. Second, making the freedmen wards of the federal government was not only unwise, as tending to perpetuate them in a state of dependency, but was contradictory of thirty years of antislavery dogma that insisted that the slave was the equal of his master and needed only to be set free to unleash his talents and resourcefulness. Last, Johnson decried the law enforcement and judicial apparatus created by the bill which would empower bureau officials to arrest

any white person who may be charged with depriving a freedman of “Any civil rights or immunities belonging to white persons” without however, defining the “civil rights and immunities” which was thus to be secured to the freedmen by military law. This military jurisdiction also extends to all questions that may arise respecting contracts.[32]

What was worse, the accused would stand trial before military tribunals

without the intervention of a jury and without any fixed rules of law or evidence. . . .The punishment will be, not what the law declares, but such as a court-martial may think proper; and from these arbitrary tribunals there lies no appeal, no writ of error to any of the courts in which the Constitution vests exclusively the judicial power of the country.[33]

One of the causes of the American Revolution had been the creation by the British of admiralty courts very similar to the ones proposed by this bill. Johnson’s veto was upheld, but later, in the summer of 1866, Congress passed a modified version of this bill over his veto.

Congress next passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866 (March 16). This act granted citizenship to all persons born in the United States (except Indians) and declared that they were entitled to all civil and legal rights enjoyed by whites. Since the Southern states had already granted most of the specific rights mentioned in this bill to the freedmen, it is clear that the real intent of this act was to grant the federal government unlimited discretion to intervene in state affairs. In his veto message, Johnson pointed out that:

hitherto every subject embraced in the enumeration of rights contained in this bill has been considered as exclusively belonging to the states. They all relate to the internal police and economy of the respective states. They are matters which in each state concern the domestic condition of its people, varying in each according to its own peculiar circumstances and the safety and well-being of its own citizens.[34]

The bill also created an even more elaborate and vigorous federal enforcement apparatus than had the Freedmen’s Bureau Bill. The act granted the power of arresting anyone who violated the act or obstructed its enforcement to federal district attorneys, federal marshals, Freedmen’s Bureau officials, and special federal commissioners who would be paid a fee for each arrest. All such persons were authorized to call to their aid federal troops or state militia in enforcing the act. Last, the federal courts were given exclusive jurisdiction over all cases arising under this law. Johnson pointed out that the act was revolutionary as well as unconstitutional. In the first place, it granted sweeping powers to federal officials and courts. In the second, it nationalized civil rights and thus marked a significant step away from a decentralized federal polity toward a centralized national one. Johnson stated:

In all our history, in all our experience as a people living under Federal and State law, no such system as that contemplated by the details of this bill has ever before been proposed or adopted. They establish for the security of the colored race safeguards which go infinitely beyond any that the General Government has ever provided for the white race. . . . They interfere with the municipal legislation of the States, with the relations existing exclusively between a State and its citizens, or between inhabitants of the same State—an absorption and assumption of power by the General Government which, if acquiesced in, must sap and destroy our federative system of limited powers and break down the barriers which preserve the rights of the States. It is another step, or rather stride, toward centralization and concentration of all legislative powers in the National Government. The tendency of the bill must be to resuscitate the spirit of rebellion and to arrest the progress of those influences which are more closely drawing around the States the bonds of union and peace.[35]

Johnson’s predictions were fully vindicated. The provisions of this act, as incorporated in the Fourteenth Amendment, have been instrumental in transforming a federal constitutional order into its opposite, and they have embittered sectional relations for generations. Johnson did not believe that the protections of this bill were necessary to protect the freedmen from being reenslaved or exploited by their former masters. And he was far from being unsympathetic to their situation, claiming:

The white race and the black race of the South have hitherto lived together under the relation of master and slave—capital owning labor. Now, suddenly, that relation is changed, and as to ownership, capital and labor are divorced. They stand now each master of itself. In this new relation, one being necessary to the other, there will be a new adjustment, which both are deeply interested in making harmonious. Each has equal power in settling the terms, and if left to the laws that regulate capital and labor it is confidently believed that they will satisfactorily work out the problem. Capital, it is true, has more intelligence, but labor is never so ignorant as not to understand its own interest, not to know its own value, and not to see that capital must pay that value. This bill frustrates this adjustment. It intervenes between capital and labor and attempts to settle the question of political economy through the agency of numerous officials whose interest it will be to foment discord between the two races, for as the breach widens their employment will continue, and when it is closed their occupation will terminate.[36]

Johnson did not believe that the planters had nefarious intentions. The Radical Republicans believed that they did have such intentions. But on whose judgment are we to place the most reliance: that of a Yankee Radical from Massachusetts such as Charles Sumner who was full of ideological obsessions and had no experience in the South at all, or a Southerner such as Andrew Johnson who was far from being the tool or dupe of the former Confederates? Johnson also raised the important question of whether it was just or democratic to pass such a momentous piece of legislation when ten states of the Union had no representation in Congress. He asked whether its passage in such circumstances would be consistent with the theory of self-government or of equal rights among the states on which the republic was founded.

The Republicans overrode Johnson’s veto of the Civil Rights Act. It was the first time in American history that Congress had overridden a presidential veto. However, they had to resort to illegality in order to prevail. When the Republicans in the Senate fell one vote short of the necessary two-thirds majority they decided upon the expedient of unseating, on a frivolous pretext, a Democratic senator from New Jersey, John P. Stockton, who was supporting Johnson’s policy. With Stockton out of the way, they had their two-thirds majority. It was not the last time that the Republicans would trample upon democratic procedures and the law to enact their agenda. But there remained one problem: The Civil Rights Act was so blatantly unconstitutional that even many Republicans doubted its legitimacy. In addition, as a mere legislative act, it was vulnerable to being repealed by a Democratic Congress or judicially nullified by a conservative Supreme Court. To meet these dangers, the Radicals decided to incorporate the provisions of the act in a constitutional amendment, the Fourteenth.

The Fourteenth Amendment is best known for granting citizenship to everyone born in the United States (except Indians) and extending federal jurisdiction over many civil rights. But it was also cleverly crafted to entrench Republican political and economic hegemony. Section 2 mandated that federal representation be reduced in proportion to how many male citizens were denied the vote in a particular state. This was obviously intended to prevent Southerners from gaining representation by the repeal of the three-fifths clause while not extending the franchise to the freedmen. Section 3 debarred ex-Confederates who, previous to the war had ever taken an oath to support the federal Constitution, from ever again holding any state or federal office, political or judicial. Its effect was to proscribe almost the entire Southern leadership class from public life. Section 4 forbade any state from paying any part of the Confederate war debt or providing compensation to the former owners of slaves; it also forbade any future Congress from repudiating the federal war debt. In addition, the Republican leaders framed the amendment to protect corporations from state regulations and interference with their affairs, although for obvious reasons they did not publicly avow this intention.

The language of Section 1 refers to “persons,” not citizens; of course, corporations were considered persons in the eyes of the American law. In 1882 Roscoe Conkling, who had been a member of the Committee of Fifteen, admitted that the committee crafted the language of the amendment to provide corporations with “congressional and administrative protection against invidious and discriminating state and local taxes and oppressive and ruinous rules applied under state laws.” He even produced the hitherto unpublished journal of the committee to prove his point.[37]

The Republicans used methods to adopt the Fourteenth Amendment that were illegal, unconstitutional, and alien to the American political tradition as it existed at that time. In Tennessee, the Republican majority found that they lacked a quorum to pass the amendment. They actually kidnapped two Democratic members who were staying away on purpose, bound them, and carried them into the legislative hall. They ratified the amendment. But there remained a problem; no other Southern state would ratify the amendment, even though the Republicans had made ratification a condition for representation. Their solution to this problem will be discussed below. In the meantime, during the long period between its congressional passage and its final ratification in July 1868, two Northern states, Ohio and New Jersey, rescinded their ratifications and voted against the amendment. The Republicans responded by simply ignoring this vote and considering the previous yes vote as binding.

As it became clear in the spring of 1866 that neither Johnson nor the Republican leaders in Congress were going to submit to the policies of the other, attention shifted to the fall elections. The Republican aim was to maintain, or increase, their veto-proof majority in Congress. The Republicans adopted a complex strategy of stealth and deceit. First, they concealed their more radical intentions, such as black suffrage, until after the elections. Second, they used congressional testimony and the newspapers to portray the South as a land still in rebellion and bent on murdering blacks. Third, in the Eastern states, they warned that a Democratic resurgence would mean repudiation of the federal debt and a lower tariff; in the Western states, they waved the bloody shirt.

Johnson was in the impossible position of being a leader without a party. He had the support of moderate Republicans, but they were a minority in the party. He had the support of the Northern Democrats, but this support was weakening him among his own adopted party. Some suggested that he form a third party, but as it takes time to build a third-party movement, this was unrealistic and could not in any event help in the fall. His only real option was to use his powers of patronage to purge the Radicals from the federal government, but for whatever reasons, he failed to do so before it was too late. The result was predictable. The Republicans lost a handful of seats, but they retained their commanding majority (3–1 in the House and 4–1 in the Senate). With the election behind them, the Republicans proceeded to launch the second and more radical phase of congressional reconstruction—the imposition of direct military rule over the South.

In his second annual message on December 3, 1866, a still defiant Johnson declared that by refusing to seat Southern congressional delegates the Republicans were violating “the great principle enunciated in the Declaration of Independence that no people ought to bear the burden of taxation and yet be denied the right of representation.”[38] Leaving aside the fact that Johnson, by supporting the war for the Union, had denied another great principle contained in the Declaration—the right of self-determination of a people—Johnson’s criticism is devastating. He also pointed out that treating the Southern states as conquered provinces was “incompatible with the nature of our republican system and with the professed objects of the war.”[39] He implored the Republicans to accept Southern representation to “consummate the work of restoration and exert a most salutary influence in the reestablishment of peace, harmony, and fraternal feeling.”[40] Of course, nothing could have been further from the intentions of the Republican leadership.

In March 1867, the Radical Republicans began the second phase of their revolution by passing two pieces of legislation. The first was the Tenure of Office Act, which forbade the president from removing any appointive civil or military officer without the consent of the Senate. Johnson promptly vetoed the act on the grounds of its unconstitutionality, but the Republicans just as promptly passed it over his veto. In his veto message, Johnson argued that

the power of removal is constitutionally vested in the President of the United States, is a principle which has been not more distinctly declared by judicial authority and judicial commentators than it has been uniformly practiced upon by legislative and executive departments of the Government.[41]

In other words, the uniform precedent of seventy-five years, both judicial and political, sanctioned an exclusive executive discretion in removals, and there was nothing in the text of the Constitution or the record of the ratification debates to suggest that the original intent had been different. The Republicans were trying to deprive the president of one of his only weapons in fighting their reconstruction policy, but they also may have intended to lay a trap for him. If Johnson removed an official without their consent, they could impeach him, which was exactly what happened. In February 1868, Johnson finally decided to dismiss Edwin Stanton, the secretary of war, who had been undermining the president’s policy from the beginning. Stanton’s Radical sympathies and activities had been known since mid-1866, but for some reason Johnson had refrained from dismissal. The House wasted no time in impeaching the president (February 24), and the case went to the Senate for trial. The Senate voted 35–19 to convict but fell one vote short of the requisite two-thirds majority due to the fact that seven moderate Republicans would not vote for conviction.

Johnson tried to persuade the public that only his plan could reunite the country: “The only safety of the nation lies in a generous and expansive plan of conciliation, and the longer this is delayed, the more difficult it will be to bring the North and South into harmony.”[42] He also warned them that the Republican plan threatened the American tradition of constitutional federalism:

We must return to constitutional limits establishing the great fact that ours is a government of limited powers with a written constitution, with boundaries both national and state, and that these limitations and boundaries must be observed and strictly enforced if free government is to exist.[43]

But while Johnson tried to reason with the public, the newspapers and the Radicals did their best to inflame them.

The second piece of Radical legislation was of far greater consequence: the Reconstruction Act, which deposed the functioning state governments in ten Southern states and placed them under martial law. It divided these states into five military districts and appointed a military governor with full and plenary powers over each. To enforce this act, Congress authorized that twenty thousand troops be stationed in the South. Almost two years after the end of the war, Congress had placed the Southern states under renewed military occupation. Congress overthrew ten state governments that had been functioning in all their political and judicial capacities for a year and a half. Moreover, these were governments that had accepted the results of the war and had been recognized by the president. The Republicans claimed that drastic action was necessary because the Southern states were in a state of disorder and anarchy which threatened the lives and property of all citizens, black and white. But this claim was just a pretext.

As Johnson pointed out, there was no state of anarchy or disorder. The Radicals had decided that the only way to force the Southern states to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment was to topple the existing governments and install new governments more amenable to Radical demands. In addition, they wanted to force black suffrage upon the South. It should be stressed that their motivation in doing so was purely mercenary—to gain Republican votes in the South—and had nothing to do with idealism or justice, as is evident in the gross hypocrisy of the 1868 Republican platform. The platform called for black suffrage to be imposed on the Southern states by federal military authority even while it maintained that the Northern states should be left at liberty to decide on their own for or against black suffrage. Johnson railed against the bill in his veto message:

The military rule which it establishes is plainly to be used, not for any purpose of order or for the prevention of crime, but solely as a means of coercing the people into the adoption of principles and measures to which it is known they are opposed, and upon which they have an undeniable right to exercise their own judgment.[44]

The Reconstruction Act bears comparison with the Massachusetts Government Act (1774), one of the Coercive Acts, which annulled the Massachusetts charter and set up a new government for that province. Johnson promptly vetoed the bill on the grounds that it was,

in its whole character, scope, and object without precedent and without authority, in palpable conflict with the plainest provisions of the Constitution, and utterly destructive to those great principles of liberty and humanity for which our ancestors on both sides of the Atlantic have shed so much blood and expended so much treasure.[45]

Those great principles of liberty included the right of self-determination, the right of self-government, and no taxation without representation. What’s more, the Reconstruction Act violated the clause of the Constitution guaranteeing each state a republican form of government:

Can it be pretended that this obligation is not palpably broken if we carry out a measure like this, which wipes away every vestige of republican government in ten states and puts the life, property, liberty, and honor of all people in each of them under the domination of a single person clothed with unlimited authority.[46]

The act also required that each state hold a new constitutional convention elected by universal manhood suffrage. However, it made former Confederate leaders ineligible to serve as delegates or vote for the same. It required the conventions to grant black suffrage and exclude former Confederate leaders from voting or serving in the state government in any capacity. Johnson thundered:

The purpose and object of this bill—the general intent which pervades it from beginning to end—is to change the entire structure and character of the State governments and to compel them by force to adoption of organic laws and regulations which they are unwilling to accept if left to themselves.[47]

Johnson went so far as to argue that the Republicans’ reconstruction policy gave credence to the Southern claim that they had seceded to protect their constitutional liberties from a lawless Northern majority that had no respect for the fundamental and organic law of the republic. He added:

Those who advocated the right of secession alleged in their own justification that we had no regard for law and that the rights of property, life, and liberty would not be safe under the Constitution as administered by us. If we now verify their assertion, we prove that they were in truth in fact fighting for their liberty, and instead of branding their leaders with the dishonoring name of traitors against a righteous and legal government we elevate them in history to the rank of self-sacrificing patriots, consecrate them to the admiration of the world, and place them by the side of Washington, Hampden, and Sidney.[48]

In his third annual message, Johnson declared that the Republicans’ reconstruction policy had dissolved the Union:

Candor compels me to declare that at this time there is no Union as our fathers understood the term, and as they meant it to be understood by us. The Union which they established can exist only where all the States are represented in both Houses of Congress; where one State is as free as another to regulate its internal concerns according to its own will, and where the laws of the central Government, strictly confined to matters of national jurisdiction, apply with equal force to all the people of every section.[49]

In comments designed to further antagonize the Republicans, Johnson called for a resumption of specie payments and reductions in the public debt, expenditures, and taxation. In his fourth annual message in December 1868, Johnson provided his final judgment on congressional Reconstruction. Although the Union had been on the verge of full restoration and sectional reconciliation in December 1866, Congress:

intervened, and, refusing to perfect the work so nearly consummated, declined to admit members from the unrepresented states, adopted a series of measures which arrested the progress of restoration, frustrated all that had been so successfully accomplished, and, after three years of agitation and strife, has left the country further from the attainment of union and fraternal feeling than at the inception of the Congressional plan of reconstruction. It needs no argument to show that legislation which has produced such baneful consequences should be abrogated.[50]

But the Republicans continued to exclude the Southern states from the Union and persisted in their attempts to revolutionize Southern society for eight more years before finally, in 1877, throwing in the towel.

Perhaps the best epitaph on the Johnson presidency came from the pen of Gideon Welles, Johnson’s secretary of the Navy:

The real and true cause of assault and persecution was the fearless and unswerving fidelity of the president to the Constitution, his opposition to central Congressional usurpation, and his maintenance of the rights of the states and of the Executive Department, against legislative aggression.

The struggle was

carried on by a fragment of Congress that arrogated to itself authority to exclude States and people from their constitutional right of representation, against an Executive striving under infinite embarrassments to preserve State, Federal and Popular Rights.[51]

---

[1] Otto Scott, “The Fourteenth Amendment,” Otto Scott’s Compass 5 (May 1995): 1.

[2] Quoted in Hans L. Trefousse, Andrew Johnson: A Biography (New York: W.W. Norton, 1989), p. 144.

[3] Orestes Brownson, “Liberalism and Progress,” Brownson’s Quarterly Review (October 1864); reprinted in Orestes Brownson: Selected Political Essays, Russell Kirk, ed. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1990), p. 166.

[4] Brownson, “The Democratic Principle,” Brownson’s Quarterly Review (April 1873); reprinted in Brownson, Selected Essays, p. 202.

[5] Quoted in Howard K. Beale, The Critical Year: A Study of Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction (New York: Frederick Ungar, [1958] 1970), p. 56.

[6] Ibid., p. 57.

[7] Ibid. For Lincoln’s millennial understanding of the war, see Allen C. Guelzo, Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 1999).

[8] Ibid., p. 57.

[9] Ibid., pp. 63–64.

[10] Ibid., pp. 60–61.

[11] Richard Taylor, Destruction and Reconstruction: Personal Experiences of the Late War (Nashville, Tenn.: J.S. Sanders, [1879] 1998), p. 251.

[12] Scott, “The Fourteenth Amendment,” p. 3.

[13] Speech by Thaddius Stevens, Congressional Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., pp. 72–75. General Richard Taylor, who was in command of the last Confederate forces to surrender east of the Mississippi, was asked by the governors of Alabama and Mississippi what they should do when news of the final Confederate surrender became known. After consulting with General Canby, the commander of all Northern military forces in the southwest, Taylor suggested with Canby’s approval that the governors call their state legislatures back into session and repeal their ordinances of secession and abolish slavery, “thus smoothing the way to the restoration of their states to the Union.” The response of the Washington government was to arrest the two governors “for abetting a new rebellion.” Taylor comments:

The North, by its Government, press, and people, had been declaring for years that the war was for the preservation of the Union, and for nothing else, and Canby and I, in the innocence of our hearts, believed it. (Taylor, p. 233)

[14] Quoted in Beale, pp. 372–73.

[15] James D. Richardson, ed., A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 1789–1902 (Washington: Bureau of National Literature and Arts, 1903), vol. 6, p. 366.

[16] Ibid., p. 354.

[17] Ibid., pp. 364–65.

[18] Quoted in Beale, Critical Year, p. 313.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Taylor, Destruction and Reconstruction, p. 242.

[21] Beale, Critical Year, p. 165.

[22] Ibid., pp. 165–69.

[23] For a more detailed account of the riot see Ludwell Johnson, North Against South: The American Iliad, 1848–1877 (Columbia, S.C.: Foundation for American Education, [1978] 1993), pp. 220–21.

[24] Ibid. and Beale, Critical Year, pp. 344–52.

[25] Taylor, pp. 256–57.

[26] Quoted in Beale, Critical Year, p. 353.

[27] Ibid., p. 354.

[28] For Taylor’s account of the riot, see his Destruction and Reconstruction, pp. 256–57.

[29] Richardson, p. 402.

[30] Ibid., pp. 401–03.

[31] Ibid., p. 399.

³²³³ Ibid.

[34] Ibid., p. 407.

[35] Ibid., pp. 412–13.

[36] Ibid., p. 412.

[37] Quoted in Beale, Critical Year, p. 218.

[38] Richardson, p. 446.

[39] Ibid., p. 447.

[40] Ibid., p. 448.

[41] Ibid., p. 493.

[42] Quoted in Beale, Critical Year, p. 27.

[43] Ibid., pp. 29–30.

[44] Richardson, p. 500.

[45] Ibid.

[46] Ibid., 506.

[47] Ibid., 507.

[48] Ibid., p. 509.

[49] Ibid., p. 559.

[50] Ibid., p. 673.

[51] Quoted in Beale, Critical Year, pp. 222–23.