USA > Alabama > Memorial record of Alabama. A concise account of the state's political, military, professional and industrial progress, together with the personal memoirs of many of its people. Volume II pt 1 > Part 8
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In the face of these facts it is remarkable that intelligent public opinion should seem to have since settled down to the conclusion that the restoration policy of Andrew Johnson was a departure from that of Abra-' ham Lincoln. Upon the all-important and controlling point. that the people of each state were to settle for themselves the question of suffrage, this being a constitutional right they had not lost, the views of Lincoln and Johnson were identical. * *
In discussing the motive which influenced congress in refusing to rec- ognize and in finally overthrowing the state governments set up by the people of the several states of the south in 1865-6, under the Lincoln- Johnson plan, and demanding constitutional amendments, a great Ameri- can law writer, Judge J. Clark Hare, himself a republican in politics, in his recent work on American Constitutional Law. p. 747, says: "When the south was prostrated by the rebellion. the dominant party resolved on measures that would tend to keep them in power and might be neces- sary for the protection of the colored race." The author, pursuing, as he declares in his preface. "jurisprudence with an eye single to truth," here affirms that the controlling motive of congress in reconstructing the states and constitution was partisan with as much confidence as if his statement were based on a decision of the supreme court.
Congress adjourned March 4th, 1865, not to convene again until the first Monday in December, unless called to meet in extra session. Johnson was inaugurated president on the 14th of April, 1865, just as the Con- federacy fell. As he intended to carry on the work of restoration upon the lines laid down by his great predecessor, he needed no aid from con- gress; and so it seemed to be a happy contingency that it was not in session. In his cabinet were Seward, McCulloch, Stanton, Welles, Dennison, Harlan and Speed-the same strong men gathered around his council board by
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the late president, and all still in favor of the Lincoln plan of restoration.
The sudden collapse of the Confederacy was remarkable. Within forty days from the date when Gen. Johnston gave up his sword there was not a single Confederate soldier in arms. The surrender was complete. Submission to the authority of the United States was everywhere abso- lute. Courts were established; the postal service rehabilitated; tax col lectors and tax assessors went about their business.
On the 29th of May, President Johnson issued the proclamation that had been approved by President Lincoln for the restoration of civil gov- ernment of North Carolina. William H. Holden was appointed provisional governor, with authority to call a convention to frame a constitution of government for the state. Proclamations, similar to that for North Caro- lina, followed for South Carolina. Georgia, Alabama, Florida and other. states. The people of the late Confederate States accepted with readiness the presidential policy of reconstruction. In fact the unanimity with which those who had waged such a desperate conflict against the union now took again the oath of allegiance to the constitution of the United States was a phenomenon that startled the republican politicians; and it must have inspired distrust in the minds of many honest northern voters But it was all in the utmost good faith; and it was not strange.
From the days when the agitation of the slavery question began to divide the country into two sections. the south always talked more about and cared more for the constitution, which it looked to for the protection of its property rights in slaves, than did the north, which relied on its majority of voters to maintain whatever views of public policy it might happen to entertain. Thus it came about that the south was as devoted to the constitution as was the north uncompromising for the union. When, therefore, the southern states had seceded, the constitution of the United States became the constitution of the Confederate States, with such changes only as would emphasize and make clearer the reserved power of the states. It is simple history to say, that the people of the Confeder- ate States looked upon themselves, during the late war, as fighting to perpetuate the constitution of their fathers. Slavery they deemed merely an incident. Secession they regarded simply as a method by which they could place themselves in a position to forever maintain inviolate the constitution of 1789. Nothing but the spirit of liberty, however mistaken it may have been, could have animated slave-holder and non-slave-holder to make side by side that terrible struggle of four years for the Confed- eracy, just as similar noble impulses animated the people of the northern states to pour out so much of their blood and treasure for the Union.
When the Confederacy had died, and independence was no longer pos- sible, slavery, it was apparent, had gone down forever. - Secession, too, was dead. These two obstacles removed, the pathway to progress in the Union seemed open. and southern people were invited now by Johnson. as they had been by Lincoln, to come back and claim the protection of the
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constitution under which they were born. They had never. in fact, lived under any other. And now it is quite clear how the southern people could and did attempt to resume their places in the union with far greater unanimity than prevailed among them when attempting to get out.
Shortly after the assembling of congress in December, 1865, the president was able to report that the people of North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas and Ten- nessee had reorganized their state governments. The thirteenth amend- ment to the constitution of the United States, abolishing slavery, had been adopted by twenty-seven states, the requisite three-fourths of the whole number. the reconstructed government of five of the seceding states having been counted as part of the twenty-seven. The conventions of the seceding states had all repealed or declared null and void the ordi- nances of secession. Every office in North Carolina, South Carolina, Alabama. Georgia, and Louisiana, legislative, executive and judicial, was filled either by an original union man or by one who, having been pardoned, had taken the oath of allegiance to the United States. The laws were in full operation. Senators and representatives from most of these states were already in Washington asking to be seated in congress, and the work of restoration, so far as it lay in the hands of the people of these states, was completed. The report to the president made by Gen. Grant. December 18th, 1865, was a fair statement of the condition at that time of public sentiment in the south. "I am satisfied the mass of thinking men in the southi accept the present situation of affairs in good faith. The questions which have hitherto divided the sentiment of the people of the two sections, slavery and state rights, or the right of the state to secede from the Union, they regard as having been settled for- ever by the highest tribunal, that of arms, that man can resort to. I was pleased to learn from the leading men whom I met that they not only accepted the decision arrived at as final, but now the smoke of battle has . cleared away and time has been given for reflection. that the decision has has been a fortunate one for the whole country, they receiving like ben- efits from it with those who opposed them in the field and in the council." But by the new state constitutions, which the southern people had made for themselves, suffrage was confined to white men, just as it was in Connecticut, Ohio. Michigan and other northern states; and, too, the senators and representatives-elect now asking to represent these late Con- federate States were mostly democrats.
This was the situation when congress convened in December, 1865. That body was largely republican in both branches. Would this republi- can congress admit these democratic states? If not, upon what ground would the refusal be based?
The first session of the thirty-ninth congress began December 4, 1865. The speaker of the house of representatives, Mr. Schuyler Colfax, upon accepting the office, said: "The thirty-eighth congress closed its consti-
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tutional existence with the storm-cloud of war still hovering over us; and after nine months' absence, congress resumes its legislative authority in these council halls, rejoicing that from shore to shore in our land there is peace."
The people of the southern states had reconstructed their governments upon the idea that peace had come; but this very same house of represent- atives, which now began with this declaration of its speaker, that peace reigned supreme, was to make war upon the state governments of the south, justifying itself upon the theory that the war was not over. The presidential plan was to be disregarded. Congress, in the langauge of Mr. Thad. Stevens, henceforth its accepted leader, was to "take no account of the aggregation of white-washed rebels who, without any legal authority, have assembled in the capitals of the late rebel states and sim- ulated legislative bodies." However completely this generation may have forgotten that Johnson's policy was Lincoln's, the members of that con- gress knew it well, for early in that session Mr. Sherman said in debate: "When Mr. Johnson came into power he found the rebellion subtantially subdued. What did he do? His first act was to retain in his confidence and in his councils every member of the cabinet of Abraham Lincoln; and, so far as we know, every measure adopted by Andrew Johnson has had the approval and sanetion of that cabinet.""
There can be but little doubt that, if Mr. Lincoln had lived, he would, during 1865, have progressed at least as rapidly with his plan of recon- struction as did President Johnson; he was always anxious to put an end to military control, and the successful ending of the war would have left him the most popular man this country has ever seen since Washington. Yet even Mr. Lincoln could not have avoided a struggle with congress.
In December, 1865, republican leaders felt that a crisis in the history of their party had come and many of them were ready to go to any extreme. Mr. Stevens said on the floor of the house of representatives, that if the late Confederate States were admitted to representation in congress under the presidential plan, without any changes in the basis of representation, these states, with the democrats "that would be elected in the best of times at the north," would control the country: and he said. on the 14th
December, 1865: "According to my judgment, they (the insurrectionary states) ought never to be recognized as capable of acting in the Union or of being counted as valid states until the constitution shall have been so amended as to make it what its makers intended: and so as to secure per- petual ascendency to the party of the Union." . First, to reduce the rep- resentation to which the late slave-holding states were entitled under the constitution; secondly, to enfranchise blacks and disfranchise whites.
* Mr. Stanton, near the close of his life, looking back over those exciting times, declared that "If Mr. Lincoln had lived, he would have had a hard time with his party, as he would have been at odds with it on reconstruction."-McCulloch, "Men and Meas- ures "
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But the mind of the nothern voter was not yet ready for negro suffrage. Pennsylvania, Ohio and other states still denied it. Connecticut, in 1865, gave a majority against it of 6.272. Even in October. 1867, Ohio gave a constitutional majority against colored suffrage of 50,629; and so late as November, 1867. Kansas was against negro suffrage by a majority of 8,938; while Minnesota adhered to the white basis by a majority of 1,298. It was perfectly clear that the people were not now, in the winter of 1865-66, prepared to endorse the extreme measures that were being mooted at Washington.
What congress would do was an interesting problem. Mr. Thad. Stev- ens, however, seemed never to have doubted how it would be solved. He predicted that public sentiment. within less than two years, would come up to his position. But to the accomplishment of such a result time and work were necessary. As a first step, on the 4th day of December,' 1865, the very day the thirty-ninth congress was organized. Mr. Stevens intro- duced and passed in the house, by a party vote of 133 to 36, under the previous question, without debate, a resolution to provide for a joint com- mittee of fifteen to report on the condition of "the states which formed the so-called Confederate States of America." The senate assented at once to the formation of the joint committee, and afterward, on the 23d day of Feburary, 1866. finally agreed to a concurrent resolution, which had been the second proposition of Mr. Stevens' original resolution, that neither house should admit any member from the late insurrectionary states until the report of the joint committee on reconstruction. thereafter to be made, shall be finally acted on. Thus it was settled that the people most vitally interested in the two great problems, the basis of represent- ation and the qualification of voters, were to have no part, in congress, at least. in their solution. But more than that, here was time gained within which the effort could be made to bring the northern mind up to Mr. Stevens' position.
The joint resolution refusing admittance to southern representatives and senators was not passed without strenuous opposition. It was an open declaration of war upon the presidential plan. Mr. Raymond, of New York, a distinguished republican, made a great speech in defense of the president's policy. Mr. Shellabarger, of Ohio. to break the force of Mr. Raymond's argument, talked thus:
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"They framed iniquity and universal murder into law Their pirates burned your unarmed commerce upon every sea. They carved the bones of your dead heroes into ornaments and drank from gob- lets made out of their skulls. They poisoned your fountains, put mines under your soldiers' prisons; organized bands whose leaders were con- cealed in your homes; and 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," etc., etc. The Hon. Henry Wilson, in his "History of Recon-
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struction," quotes this and many other similar passionate appeals, intend- ing them, of course, as fair specimens of the arguments which brought about the re-construction of Federal and state constitutions ..
Early in this session congress sent to the president a civil rights bill, conferring many rights, not including suffrage, however, upon emanci- pated slaves. This Mr. Johnson vetced on the ground that it was uncon- stitutional: and, according to decisions since made by the supreme court, it was. The veto of this bill greatly aggravated the quarrel, which was already open and bitter, between the president and congress. It also lost Mr. Johnson the support of Messrs. Dennison, Harlan and Speed, who resigned from the cabinet. Mr. Stanton, too, became an avowed enemy of the president and his policy. But he did not resign. He was advised by Mr. Sumner and others to "stick"; and he remained in the cabinet as an obstructionist. This was utterly without precedent, and serves well to illustrate the height to which party passion had risen. Another reason for the break in the cabinet, in all probability, was that southern democrats very naturally were supporting President Johnson's policy. Senator Wilson's "History of Reconstruction" is full of eloquent in- vectives launched in the house and senate at Andrew Johnson because he was supported by democrats. "rebels," "copper-heads." "traitors," "im- porters of poisoned clothing," etc., etc. The memorable words of Mr. Lincoln in his last annual message were: "The war will cease on the part of the government whenever it shall have ceased on the part of those who began it." But Mr. Lincoln had passed away and his words had lost their power. Mr. Blaine, in his "Twenty Years," even mentions it as a cause of offense that those who were in arms against the government when congress adjourned in March. 1865, were. some of them, at the hotels in Washington, demanding to be admitted to seats in the congress which met in December. The inflammatory debates in the first session of the thirty- ninth congress were preliminary to the canvass for members of congress to be elected in the autumn of 1866. No factor in those elections proved more potential than the rejection by southern legislatures of the pending fourteenth amendment to the constitution of the United States. The clauses on which its acceptance or rejection turned in these assemblies' were: Section II., which apportioned representatives in congress upon the basis of the voting population; section III., which provided that no person should hold office under the United States who, having taken an oath as a Federal or state officer to support the constitution, had subsequently engaged in war against the union. It was claimed by the friends of the amendment to be especially unfair that the south should have represent- ation for its freemen and not give them the ballot. The right, however, of a state to have representation for all its free inhabitants, whether voters or not, was secured by the constitution, and that instrument even allowed three-fifths representation for slaves. New York, Ohio and other states denied the ballot to free negroes; some states excluded by property
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qualifications and others by educational tests, yet all enjoyed representa- tion for all their peoples.
The reply to this was that the constitution ought to be amended be- cause the south would now have, if the negroes were denied the ballot, a larger proportion of non-voters than the north. Southern people were slow to see that this was good reason for change in the constitution, especially as they believed they were already entitled to representation, and conceived that they ought to have a voice in proposing as well as in the ratification of amendments. Five of the restored states had already ratified the thirteenth amendment, and such ratification had been counted valid. If they were states, they were certainly entitled to representation. So they claimed.
It was perhaps imprudent for southern people at that time to under- take to chop logic with their conquerors, or indeed to claim any rights at all-as the net results of their insistence were, that they were called "impudent claimants" by the republican convention at Pittsburgh, and indeed everywhere in the republican press.
The insuperable objection, however, to the ratification of the fourteenth amendment was to be found in the clause which required the people of the late Confederate States to disfranchise their own leaders, to brand with dishonor those who had led them in peace and in war. The rejection of this amendment at the south greatly strengthened the republican posi- tion; because the north, looking at it from a different stand-point, thought the proposition a fair one. If any among those who proposed the amendment intended it should be rejected, it was shrewdly devised; if it was not intended to procure its own rejection, then it was clumsily con- trived.
Even before the close of the war public sentiment had demanded some provision for the protection of the liberated slaves, who everywhere came flocking into the union lines. The result was the establishment by law, March 3d. 1865, of a Freedman's bureau. which was speedily extended. after hostilities had ceased, into all the late Confederate States. The law made the agents of this bureau guardians of freedmen, with power to make their contracts, settle their disputes with employers and care for them generally. The position of bureau agent was one of power and respon- sibility, capable of being used beneficently, and sometimes, no doubt, it was, but these officials were subjected to great temptation. Many people, who believed that the newly emancipated slave needed a guardian to take care of him. believed also that. if he only had the ballot. he could take care of himself and the country, too. In fact, the sentiment in favor of universal suffrage was already strong, even in the spring of 1565; and it was natural for every bureau agent, who might have a turn for politics, to conclude that, with the bureau's help. Mr. Stevens and his friends might eventually succeed in giving the negro the ballot. The bureau agent was "the next friend" of the negro. . With negro suffrage, this
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official's fortune was made. Without it, of course, this stranger had no hope of office in the south. It was not therefore to his interest, if he had political aspirations. that there should be peace between the races.
From conscientious men, connected with this bureau. Gen. Grant obtained the information upon which he based the opinion, given to the president in the report already quoted from, that "the belief widely spread among the freedmen of the southern states that the lands of their former owners will, at least in part, be divided among them. has come from the agents of this bureau. This belief is seriously interfering with the willingness of the freedien to make contracts for the coming year." And he further said: "Many, perhaps the majority. of the agents of the Freedmen's Bureau advise the freedmen that by their own industry they must expect to live. . . . In some instances, I am sorry to say, the freed- man's mind does not seem to be disabused of the idea that he has a right to live without care or provision for the future. The effect of the belief in the division of lands is idleness and accumulation in camps, towns and cities."
The first lesson in the horn-book of liberty for the freedman obviously was, that in the sweat of his face he must earn his bread-a law unto all men since the days of Adam. It is a sad commentary on the workings of the bureau, that the best thing Gen. Grant could say of its agents was, that "many, and perhaps a majority of them," did so advise. If these of- ficials were really responsible. as Gen. Grant believed, for the demoral- ized labor condition at the south-and their power over the freedmen is beyond all question-then they were, in fact, organizing chaos where their mission was peace and good order. Nearly every one of these agents, who remained south after reconstruction, was a candidate for office: and many actually became governors, judges, legislators, congressmen, post- masters, revenue officers, etc.
Such a situation as confronted southern legislatures in the fall and early winter of 1865 Was never before witnessed in America. Prior to 1861 the laws to compel people to industrious habits were not generally so stringent in the south as in the north. This resulted partly from slavery and partly from the easy conditions of life in a mild climate. There were no laws that met the new situation. New and stringent stat- utes were passed to prevent vagrancy and idleness, but they did not merit the odium visited upon them by many honest northern voters, who, not understanding the situation, were led to believe them nothing short of an effort to re-enslave the negro, when their purpose was simply to counteract the teachings that had demoralized the freedman and compel him to industrious habits.
The passage of the concurrent resolution in December, 1865, to in- quire into the condition of the late Confederate States meant open hostility to the presidential plan. Having declared war, the dominant party of course exercised great care in selecting members to serve on the commit-
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tee which was to make this inquiry. Mr. Blaine (Vol. II., p. 127), says: "It was foreseen that in an especial degree the fortunes of the republican party would be in the keeping of the fifteen men who might be chosen." Speaker Colfax and the appointing power in the senate put on the com- mittee twelve republicans and only three democrats, one from the senate and two from the house.
The field from which testimony was to be drawn was the unrepre- sented south. On the sub-committee which took testimony as to Virginia, North Carolina. South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama. Mississippi and Ar- kansas, there was not a democrat to call or to question a witness. The only hope of fair play lay in the magnanimity or sense of justice of men who had already voted to refuse admission to the southern members and who were placed upon the committee with the expectation. as Mr. Blaine has indicated. that they would take care of the republican party There is not space here to discuss the evidence of the witnesses, who chose or were chosen to come before these gentlemen. It consists of hundreds of pages of speculative testimony. hearsay. etc.
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