THE FAILURE TO DISLODGE THE PRESIDENT
IN 1867 an act of Congress was passed depriving the President of the power to issue an amnesty proclamation, which he overrode. His disposition and his plans to defy Congress and pursue his own method of reconstructing the South caused Congress to deprive him of the command of the army, a bold act, the constitutionality of which might well be disputed at any stage, but which illustrates the almost desperate frame of mind in which Congress then was. Johnson’s continued defiance was met by the enactment into law of the Tenure-of-Office bill, which prevented him from making a change in his cabinet, his own official household.
These strained relations between the President and Congress, which had existed for more than two years, reached an open rupture on February 21, 1868, when the President informed the Senate that he had removed Edwin M. Stanton as Secretary of War, contrary to the Tenure-of-Office act. The House at once adopted a resolution, by a vote of 122 to 47 (not voting 17) to “impeach Andrew Johnson, President of the United States, of high crimes and misdemeanors.” James G. Blaine, in his “Twenty Years of Congress,” says that, in adopting this resolution of impeachment, Congress acted hastily; but it is the opinion of many still living that he did not consider the precedent circumstances, which, as much as the removal of Stanton, led 122 congressmen to cast their votes for impeachment. Still, it was probably fortunate for the nation that Johnson was saved from impeachment by one senatorial vote. If Johnson had been impeached, Ben. Wade of Ohio, a fearless Republican statesman, would have become President. Wade was a Radical of the Radicals, who always had the courage of his convictions. He probably would have given the whole force of his administration to the plan of Thad. Stevens to organize the South into territories and govern it as such, yet granting the States readmission to the Union gradually and on stipulated terms. The people of the North were so enraged over the assassination of Lincoln and the continued efforts of the Southern States to nullify the Thirteenth Amendment that they might then have approved the Stevens plan of reconstruction. At this day, nearly half a century after Appomattox, it seems best that neither the Johnson plan nor the Stevens plan did prevail.
TWO CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENTS
THE failure to impeach Johnson accentuated the need of further constitutional amendment. As early as June 13, 1866, the Fourteenth Amendment, declaring that no State may abridge the rights of citizens of the United States, was proposed in Congress, but it was not finally ratified and declared to be in force until July 28, 1868. California never took final action on this amendment. It was rejected by Delaware, Maryland, and Kentucky. New Jersey and Ohio rescinded their ratification of it. Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia at first rejected the amendment, but afterward ratified it.
Notwithstanding the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, feud, anarchy, and devastation continued in the Southern country, and the failure to impeach Johnson was an incentive to continued disorder. How to secure peace, justice, and prosperity was the pressing question of the hour. Congress had tried constitutional amendments, and the South ignored them. It had tried civil-rights bills, which were useless without military power to enforce them. Then Congress said in effect to the Southern people: “If you have not a loyal white majority which can be trusted with the administration of civil government, we will enfranchise the black man. We must either garrison every school district with Union troops in order to protect the Negro from a peonage that is practical reënslavement, or we must give him the ballot and let him protect himself.” It was believed that the contending ambitions of office-seekers to obtain the colored man’s vote would cause them to treat him justly.
It was such conditions that produced the Fifteenth Amendment, providing that no State might deprive a citizen of his vote “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” The first draft contained the word “nativity,” which was obnoxious to the Pacific coast because of the apprehension of Chinese suffrage, so the word was eliminated. Nevada was the first State to ratify the Fifteenth Amendment. California, Oregon, Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and New Jersey rejected it. Georgia and Ohio at first rejected it, but finally ratified it. New York rescinded her ratification. The amendment was proposed February 26, 1869, and declared in force March 30, 1870.
Half a century ago human slavery had been banished from every civilized nation in the world except the United States. Here it was intrenched behind apparently impregnable fortifications composed of cotton-bales, pulpits, and counting-rooms, of bank vaults and political conventions.
The reverberations of Sumter’s guns changed a majority of the people of the Northern States from conservative indifference to toleration of antislavery sentiments, and, as the war progressed, into active abolitionists; and thus the Emancipation Proclamation was acclaimed by millions who three years before would have scouted such a measure. It is more than forty-seven years since the last gun was fired in the Civil War; it is more than forty years since the last measure of reconstruction was enacted. The generals and statesmen of that historic era have journeyed on. The veterans in the soldiers’ homes grow rapidly fewer in number, and it will not be many years until the last of them will have joined the great majority. The acerbities and rancors of the war have been submerged in Lethean waters, and the Southern States, once desolated, have become prosperous and powerful supporters of the Old Flag.
