On the 29th of May the new President commenced the Sisyphus business of Southern reconstruction; first rolling to the top of the hill the stone of a provisional government for North Carolina, which, of course, rolled back again, covered by the old shells of the Confederacy. By the middle of July he had tugged up the same stone under different names, as Mississippi, Georgia, Texas, Alabama, Florida, and South Carolina, only to find it rolling down speedily, hurting the colored people and Union whites, and creating a butternut-colored atmosphere all around it. The entertainment was too often repeated to be jocose, except to Mr. Johnson, who believed in a detached idea industriously pursued. The delegates to Congress under his scheme, who presented themselves at Washington, in December, 1865, were found to be all of the saffron complexion and hue. They had already forgotten that there had been any war, and only remembered their ancient rights, and were ready to draw back pay, or anything else back, except declarations of not having been in the least wrong in the late little unpleasantness. Congress read their own privileges, rights, and duties in quite a different way; declared their exclusive right, as representatives of the people, to deal with the new puzzles; passed the Freedmen’s Bureau Bill for the protection of the colored property of the South, the Civil Rights Bill, and the proposed Fourteenth Constitutional Amendment. While they believed in the dead past burying its dead, they did not embrace the idea of its burying the living with them.
Mr. Johnson now studied the Art of Vetoing Made Easy; and from his cross-readings began to add immensely to the American official archives by Xanthippe messages, whose unlovely words have greatly embossed the rich cabinets of vituperative specimens, for a long time accumulating at Washington.
The Irish Republic in America.
(p. 529)
In July, 1866, a riot was created in New Orleans,—the counterpart of the pat-riot disturbances in New York three years before,—in which thirty-four loyal colored and three loyal colorless people were added to the Crescent cemeteries. The citizens who had participated in the bonfires and illuminations, on the arrival of Farragut and Porter in 1862 were mercifully spared. In August following, the acting President, accompanied by Mr. Seward,—whose wonderful pen through the silent diplomatic struggle abroad, which ran parallel with the armed strife at home, cannot be alluded to with scant praise,—set out for Chicago, to lay the corner-stone of a monument to the powerful dike-breaker. Never was a journey so long. The road thither seemed to have got intoxicated and reeled and tumbled all over the West; while the jerky speeches, hiccuping along the wavy ways, endeavored in vain to catch up with and to find the President.
This year was made memorable by the establishment of a wonderful republic for Ireland in Union Square, New York, and the quiet election, without any votes, of Mr. Roberts to be its head; an Irish invention, for the easy solution of that perplexing question of how to get enough votes, most praiseworthy. The novel mode of raising an army, and of replenishing a treasury, whose invisible outflow was so steady and well regulated that it never perplexed Wall Street, were admirable illustrations of the good-nature of the friendly sons and daughters of Saint Patrick.
The sham-rock, on which they touched poured out streams as abundant as the rock which Moses struck. Indeed, it was almost as good a milch cow as Plymouth Rock.
In February, 1867, the French moths,—hatched out in 1862 in a Napoleonic fancy nest, and darting off into Mexico, through whose chronic flames they played with the usual results,—were terribly scorched in a candle sent out by Mr. Seward. The head moth, Maximilian, fascinated by the gilt of an imperial candelabra, was so burnt, that he disappeared like the vagaries of South American empire, which hovered on the wings of that other Gallic moth, that now flits around the gas-jets of the Tuileries.
Mr. Johnson’s amnesties and pardons are too numerous for anything but a calculating-machine. He began May 29, 1865, and only ended March 4, 1869. Tired of cross-reading the Constitution, he betook himself to Scripture, and, with his mode of interpretation, spelt out a duty to forgive all of the unrepentant, including Mr. J. Davis, the prize-taking Breckenridge, and other conspicuous sinners.
In spite of the semi-weekly vetoes, however, which obliged Congress to pass all laws twice, it contrived to reconstruct all of the lately disorganizing and disorganized States except Virginia, Mississippi, and Texas. Some very poor Northern timber and unconstitutional braces were wrought into the hastily constructed and urgently needed fabrics, which, however, it is to be hoped, will be speedily removed. Angry with the solution of the puzzles, the President attempted to read athwart the Tenure of Office Act Mr. Stanton’s war duties, for which, March 5, 1869, he was requested by the House of Representatives to appear before the Senate and make answer. From March 29th to May 16th his trial lasted, interflecked by some fine veins of forensic eloquence, and at last bringing out the value of a single vote,—that which prevented conviction,—for the benefit of future electoral harangues.