The Life of Lyman Trumbull

by Horace White

The Fourteenth Amendment passed the Senate June 8, by 33 to 11, and the House June 13, by 138 to 36. Sumner had opposed it bitterly in debate because it dodged, as he said, the question of negro suffrage; but when the vote was taken he recorded himself in the affirmative.

The report of the committee giving the reasons for their action was submitted on the 18th of June. It held that the seceding states, having withdrawn from Congress and levied war against the United States, could be restored to their former places only by permission of the constitutional power against which they had rebelled acting through all the coördinate branches of the Government and not by the executive department alone.

If the President [it said] may, at his will and under his own authority, whether as military commander, or chief executive, qualify persons to appoint Senators and elect Representatives, and empower others to elect and appoint them, he thereby practically controls the organization of the legislative department. The constitutional form of government is thereby practically destroyed, and its powers absorbed by the Executive. And while your committee do not for a moment impute to the President any such design, but cheerfully concede to him the most patriotic motives, they cannot but look with alarm upon a precedent so fraught with danger to the Republic.

This conclusion was logical but misleading. The danger to the Republic lay not in the absorption of powers by the Executive, but in the prolongation of chaos, in dethroning intelligence, and arming ignorance in the desolated districts of the South.[96]

Stevens also reported a bill "to provide for restoring the states lately in insurrection to their full political rights." It recited that whenever the Fourteenth Amendment should become a part of the Constitution, and any state lately in insurrection should have ratified it and conformed itself thereto, its duly elected Senators and Representatives would be admissible to seats in Congress. This bill was not acted on, but lay on the table of each house awaiting the action of the Southern States on the proposed amendment.

On July 23, the two houses adopted a preamble and joint resolution admitting Tennessee to her former relations to the Union. The preamble recited that that state had ratified the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution. There were only four negative votes on the Tennessee bill: Brown and Sumner, Republicans, and Buckalew and McDougall, Democrats. The President signed the bill, but he added a brief message explaining that his reason for doing so was that he desired to remove every cause of further delay, whether real or imaginary, to the admission of the Representatives of Tennessee, but he affirmed that Congress could not rightfully make the passage of such a law a condition precedent to such admission in the case of Tennessee, or of any other state.

The next event of importance in the controversy over Reconstruction was the National Union Convention held in Philadelphia on the 14th of August. It was composed of delegates from all the states and territories, North and South, who sustained the President's policy and acquiesced in the results of the war, including the abolition of slavery. This came to be known as the "Arm-in-Arm Convention" as the procession leading to the platform was headed by two delegates, one from Massachusetts and one from South Carolina, walking together with their arms joined. The signers of the call embraced the names of A. W. Randall, ex-governor of Wisconsin, Senators Cowan, Doolittle, Fowler, Norton, Dixon, Nesmith, and Hendricks, and ex-senator Browning, then Secretary of the Interior. The convention itself was eminently respectable in point of numbers and character. It was presided over by Senator Doolittle, and the chairman of its Committee on Resolutions was Senator Cowan. The resolutions adopted were ten in number and were faultless in principle and in expression. They were conveyed to the President by a committee of seventy-two persons. The effect of this dignified movement was offset and neutralized in large part by one paragraph of the President's reply to the presentation speech, namely:

We have witnessed in one department of the Government every endeavor to prevent the restoration of peace, harmony, and union. We have seen hanging upon the verge of the Government, as it were, a body called, or which assumed to be, the Congress of the United States, while in fact it is a Congress of only a part of the states. We have seen this Congress pretend to be for the Union when its every step and act tended to perpetuate disunion and make the disruption of the states inevitable. Instead of promoting reconciliation and harmony its legislation has partaken of the character of penalties, retaliation, and revenge. This has been the course and policy of your Government.

This impeachment of the legality of Congress was followed by a battle in the political field, which raged with increasing fury during the whole remainder of Johnson's term of office and projected itself into the two terms of President Grant and the beginning of that of President Hayes, embracing the episodes of the impeachment trial and the Liberal Republican movement of 1872. All of this turmoil, and the suffering which it brought upon the South, would, probably, have been avoided if Lincoln, with his strong hold upon the loyal sentiment of the country and his readiness to conciliate opponents, without surrendering principle, had not been assassinated. They became possible if not inevitable when the presidential chair was taken, in a time of crisis, by a man of combative temper, without prestige in the North, and devoid of tact although of good intentions and undoubted patriotism.