with the response from Washington, precipitated the conflict of theories into a combat of arms for which neither party was prepared.
The debate ended, battle at hand, Southern men had to choose between the North and the South, between their convictions and predilections on one side and expatriation on the other side, resistance to invasion, not secession, the issue. But, four years later, when in 1865 all that they had believed and feared in 1861 had come to pass, these men required no drastic measures to bring them to terms. Events more potent than acts of Congress had already reconstructed them. Lincoln, with a forecast of this, had shaped his ends accordingly. Johnson, himself a Southern man, understood it even better than Lincoln, and backed by the legacy of Lincoln, he proceeded not very skilfully to build upon it.
The assassination of Lincoln, however, had played directly into the hands of the radicals, led by Ben Wade, in the Senate, and Thaddeus Stevens in the House. Prior to that baleful night they had fallen behind the marching van. The mad act of Booth put them upon their feet and brought them to the front. They were implacable men, politicians equally of resolution and ability. Events quickly succeeding favored them and their plans. It was not alone Johnson’s lack of temper and tact that gave them the whip-hand. His removal from office would have opened the door of the White House to Wade, so that strategically Johnson’s position was from the beginning beleaguered and, before the close, came perilously near to being untenable.
From a photograph taken about 1872, owned by Mr. F. H. Meserve
LYMAN TRUMBULL
Grant, who, up to the time of his nomination for the Presidency, had had no partizan conviction, not Wade, the uncompromising extremist, came after, and inevitably four years of Grant had again divided the triumphant Republicans. This was the situation during the winter of 1871–72, when the approaching Presidential election brought the country face to face with an extraordinary state of affairs. The South was in irons. The North was growing restive. Thinking people everywhere felt that conditions so anomalous to our institutions could not last.
II
JOHNSON had made a bungling attempt to carry out the policies of Lincoln and had gone down in the strife. The Democratic party had reached the ebb-tide of its disastrous fortunes. It seemed the merest reactionary. A group of influential Republicans, for one cause or another dissatisfied with Grant, held a caucus and issued a call for what they described as a Liberal Republican Convention to assemble in Cincinnati, May 1, 1872.[1]
A Southern man and a Confederate soldier, a Democrat by inheritance and conviction, I had been making in Kentucky an unequal fight for the acceptance of the inevitable. The line of cleavage between the old and the new South I had placed upon the last three amendments to the Constitution, naming them the Treaty of Peace between the sections. The negro must be invested with the rights conferred upon him by these amendments, however mistaken and injudicious the South might think them. The obsolete black laws instituted during the slave régime must be removed from the statute-books. The negro, like Mohammed’s coffin, swung in mid-air. He was neither fish, flesh, nor fowl, nor good red herring. For our own sake we must habilitate him, educate and elevate him, make him, if possible, a contented and useful citizen. Failing of this, free government itself might be imperiled.