The New Nation

by Frederic L. Paxson

In the Thirty-ninth Congress, which sat in 1865 and 1866, it was the problem of the leaders, Charles Sumner in the Senate and Thaddeus Stevens in the House, to hold the party together and to block the designs of the President. In the House, the heavy Republican majority made this easy. In the Senate the majority was slighter, and could be kept at two thirds only by unseating a Democratic Senator from New Jersey, after which event both houses were able to defy Johnson and to pass measures over his veto. The vetoes began when Johnson refused his consent to the Freedmen's Bureau and the Civil Rights Bills. These and all other important acts of reconstruction were forced upon the President by the two-thirds vote.

The split, so far as founded upon honest divergence in legal theory, was embarrassing. It was made disgraceful by the violence of the radical Republicans and the intemperate retorts of Johnson. In 1866 Congress sent the Fourteenth Amendment to the States for ratification. In 1867 it passed its bills for actual reconstruction under the control of the army of the United States, and defied Johnson to interfere by refusing to allow him to remove officials from office.

Johnson carried himself through the partisan struggle with ability and success. His language was often extreme, but he enforced the acts which Congress passed as vigorously as if they had been his own. So far as any theory of the Constitution met the facts of reconstruction, his has the advantage, but in a situation not foreseen by the Constitution force outranked logic, and the radical Republicans with two-thirds in each house possessed the force. There was no lapse in the President's diligence and no flaw in his official character which his enemies could use. They began to talk of impeachment in 1866, but could find no basis for it.

The Tenure-of-Office Act furnished the pretext for impeachment. Advised by his Attorney-General that it was unconstitutional, Johnson dismissed the Secretary of War, Edwin M. Stanton, for whose protection the law had been passed. In removing Stanton he broke with Grant, commanding the army, over a question of veracity, and gave to Congress its chance. In February, 1868, the House of Representatives voted to impeach him.

The trial of Andrew Johnson before the Senate dragged through April and May. The articles of impeachment were long and detailed in their description of the unquestioned bad manners of the President, but the only specific violation of law cited was in the case of Stanton, and here it could be urged both that the law was unconstitutional and that it was so loosely drawn that it did not really cover this case. In brief, it was the policy of Johnson that was on trial, and it was finally impossible to persuade two-thirds of the Senators that this constituted a high crime or a misdemeanor. The President was acquitted in the middle of May, while the Republican party turned to the more hopeful work of electing his successor.

In the fight over Johnson party lines had been strengthened and defined so that no Unionist, not in sympathy with congressional reconstruction, could hope for the nomination. No other issue equaled this in strength. The greenback issue was condemned in a plank that denounced "all forms of repudiation as a national crime," but ran second to the basis of reconstruction. No other candidate than Ulysses S. Grant was considered at the Chicago Convention.

Few men have emerged from deserved obscurity to deserved prominence as rapidly as General Grant. In 1861 he was a retired army officer, and a failure. In 1863, as the victor at Fort Donelson and at Vicksburg, he loomed up in national proportions. In the hammering of 1864 and 1865 it was his persistence and moral courage that won the day. In 1868, as commander of the army, and fortunate in his quarrel with Johnson, he was the coveted candidate of both parties, for he had no politics. Held by his associations to the Republican leaders, he was nominated at Chicago on the first ballot, with Schuyler Colfax, of Indiana, as his Vice-President.

The nomination of Grant occurred as the impeachment trial was drawing to a close. Before Congress adjourned it readmitted several of the Southern States that had been restored under the control of Republican majorities. Tennessee was already back; the new States were North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, and Arkansas. Only three States remained under provisional control when Grant was elected in November and seated in the following March. As he took the oath of office there were few, North, South, or West, who did not rejoice in his election; he had defeated the Greenback pretension, which endeared him to the East; the West remembered that he had been born and bred in the Mississippi Valley; and to the South he presented the clean hands of the regular army officer, and the welcome promise of his letter of acceptance, "Let us have peace."

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

For general accounts of the Far West in this period consult K. Coman, Economic Beginnings of the Far West (2 vols., 1912), and F.L. Paxson, The Last American Frontier (1910). These should be supplemented by E.L. Bogart, Economic History of the United States (1907), K. Coman, Industrial History of the United States (2d ed., 1910), W.A. Scott, The Repudiation of State Debts (1893), and W.C. Mitchell, History of the Greenbacks. The more valuable memoirs include H. McCulloch, Men and Measures of Half a Century (1888), and J.G. Blaine, Twenty Years of Congress (2 vols., 1884). A brilliant analysis of the financial interests of the debtor sections is M.S. Wildman, Money Inflation in the United States (1905). Rhodes continues to furnish a comprehensive narrative, and is paralleled by the shorter W.A. Dunning, Reconstruction, Political and Economic, 1865-1877 (in The American Nation, vol. 22, 1907). A detailed account of impeachment politics is in D.M. DeWitt, Impeachment and Trial of Andrew Johnson (1903), and in J.A. Woodburn, The Life of Thaddeus Stevens (1913). J.P. Davis, The Union Pacific Railway (1894), is the standard account of the early movement for a continental railroad. S.L. Clemens (Mark Twain) presents a vivid picture of frontier life in Roughing It (1872), while A.B. Paine, Mark Twain (3 vols., 1912), contains much material of general historical interest for this period.