Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction Allen Guelzo (novels to read .txt) 📖

and, taking no hint from his “swing round the circle,” voters gave the Radicals a veto-proof majority in both houses of Congress—43 to 9 in the Senate, 173 to 53 in the House. Johnson had now lost control not only of his public image but also of his administration. Even Tennessee, to Johnson’s embarrassment, gave up on Johnson and ratified the Fourteenth Amendment as part of a deal that would guarantee the readmission of Tennessee’s representatives and senators to Congress on Congress’s terms. “We have fought the battle and won it,” crowed Parson Brownlow, who was now Tennessee’s Republican governor and the deadly political enemy of Andrew Johnson. “Give my respects to the dead dog in the White House.”69

THE GOVERNMENT OF THE UNITED STATES ABANDONS YOU

The results of the congressional in 1866 were an open invitation to the Radicals, with Thaddeus Stevens the dominant Radical of the House and Ben Wade the new president pro tem of the Senate, to take up the reins of Reconstruction from Johnson’s faltering hands and substitute a congressional Reconstruction plan. They moved first on January 22, 1867, by passing a bill that called the newly elected 40th Congress to order on March 4, 1867, immediately after the close of the 39th Congress, rather than the following December, so as to give Johnson no opportunities for mischief during a congressional recess. With that foundation securely under foot, the Joint Committee on Reconstruction turned to the scaffolding of congressional Reconstruction, and on March 2, 1867, Congress enacted the first of three major Reconstruction Acts. Declaring that “no legal State governments or adequate protection for life or property now exists in the rebel states,” the First Reconstruction Act consolidated most of the old Confederacy into five “military districts”: Virginia would constitute the first, the Carolinas the second, Georgia, Alabama, and Florida the third, Mississippi and Arkansas the fourth, and Texas and Louisiana the fifth. Each district would be supervised by an army general appointed by the president, and other army officers and Freedmen’s Bureau agents would act as adjuncts to the civilian administrations in properly registering voters.70

Despite such martial appearances, the “military districts” really did employ most of the civilian procedures associated with organizing territories. Civil governments would exist, but the army would have overall supervision of the civil process and fine-tune the operation of civil government until the state regimes began to look like what Congress wanted. When “the people of any one of said rebel States”—which included all adult males of “whatever race, color, or previous condition,” but not former Confederate civil officials or military officers—were willing to write a new state constitution embracing the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, Congress would recognize a Southern state and admit its civil representatives as members of Congress rather than mere “delegates.”

President Johnson, of course, vetoed the First Reconstruction Act. The Radicals anticipated this, and Congress overrode the veto without hesitation. In fact, they anticipated more than just a veto. On the same day that Congress passed the First Reconstruction Act, a rider was attached to a military appropriations bill to limit Johnson’s ability to make military appointments and issue orders to military commanders, and to force the president to pass all of his orders through the general in chief (which in this case was Grant). This would ensure, as much as possible, that the new district commanders would see themselves as answerable more to Grant and Congress than to the president. And to make sure that Johnson would not try to circumvent the operation of the Reconstruction Act through his use of civilian patronage appointments, Congress added the Tenure of Office Act in March 1867. The new statute prevented the president from unilaterally removing civilian government job holders until the Senate approved a successor for that office, a step designed to further clip Johnson’s presidential wings. (If the Senate was in recess, the president would be allowed only to “suspend” an officeholder until the Senate reconvened.) Johnson vetoed the act; Congress overrode the veto.71

The third stone in the new edifice of Reconstruction was the Second Reconstruction Act, passed on March 23, 1867, which established the procedures for registering eligible white and black voters—and excluding any Southern participants “in any rebellion or civil war against the United States.” Johnson vetoed this one, too; Congress just as easily overrode the veto. “We must establish the doctrine of National Jurisdiction over all the States in State matters of the Franchise,” warned Thaddeus Stevens, “or we shall finally be ruined.”72

Andrew Johnson’s presidency was by this point so impotent that simply getting rid of him seemed worth considering, especially since Ben Wade, as the president pro tem of the Senate, would be his constitutional successor. Discussions among the Radicals about impeaching Johnson and removing him from the presidency had flickered as early as his veto of the civil rights bill in 1866 (Hannibal Hamlin, whom Johnson had supplanted as vice president in 1864, took up the impeach-Johnson cry that fall, asking, “Did we fight down the rebellion to give the South more power?”). But not until January 1867, when it was clear that the incoming Congress would give them almost unstoppable momentum, did the Republican caucus in the House begin seriously considering such a move.73

Once considered, however, action quickly followed: on January 7 (the same day as the Senate overrode Johnson’s veto of a bill to extend voting rights to blacks in the District of Columbia), James Ashley, the Radical Ohio representative who had been the floor manager for the Thirteenth Amendment, moved for Johnson’s impeachment on the grounds that he had “corruptly used” the presidential pardoning, veto, and appointment powers. That effort died in the House Judiciary Committee, which found no specific evidence it could use as the basis for impeachment proceedings beyond Johnson’s political truculence. When the 40th Congress began work in March, Ashley tried again, hoping that a new Judiciary Committee would be more favorable to impeaching a conspirator who “came into the presidency by the door of assassination”