History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States

by William Horatio Barnes

In June, 1865, delegates from the South were first admitted to private interviews with the President. On the 17th of June he issued his proclamation providing for the restoration of civil government in Georgia and Alabama, in which he excludes negroes from the category of loyal citizens entitled to vote. The President soon after proceeded to appoint provisional governors for the Southern States—a step which was viewed with joy by the late rebels, and sorrow by the Union men of the North. The character of these appointments may be seen in a sentiment uttered by Governor Perry soon after his elevation to office: "There is not now in the Southern States," said he, "any one who feels more bitterly the humiliation and degradation of going back into the Union than I do." Governor Perry saved himself from dismissal by assuring the people that the death of Mr. Lincoln was no loss to the South, while he had every hope that Mr. Johnson, an old slaveholding Democrat, would be an advantage.

In Alabama, under the provisional government established by Mr. Johnson, the convention prohibited negroes from testifying in the courts. Rebels throughout the South at once began to make their arrangements for taking part in the government. In November, Governor Perry made a public demand that when Congress met the Clerk of the House should place on the roll the names of Representatives from the rebel States.

When South Carolina hesitated to adopt the Constitutional Amendment abolishing slavery, President Johnson assured the Governor that the clause giving Congress the power to enforce it by appropriate legislation really limited congressional control over the negro question. After this assurance, South Carolina accepted the Constitutional Amendment.

In August and September, 1865, Democratic conventions indorsed the President's policy, and Democratic papers began to praise him. Republicans were unwilling to believe that they had been deserted, and hoped that after the assembling of Congress all differences would disappear.

The message of the President, read at the opening of the Thirty-ninth Congress, placed him in direct opposition to the leaders of the Republican party, and at variance with his own policy. "A concession of the elective franchise," said he, "to the freedmen, by act of the President of the United States, must have been extended to all colored men, wherever found, and must have established a change of suffrage in the Northern, Middle, and Western States, not less than in the Southern and Southwestern."

Every one could see that the President possessed as much power to admit the black man to the right of suffrage in the rebel States as to appoint provisional governors over them.

While Congress was in session, and actually employed in legislating for the restoration of the rebel States, Mr. Johnson substantially declared that Congress had no control over the subject, by removing the provisional governor of Alabama, and handing the State Government over to the officers elected by the people.

The Senate having requested information from the President as to the condition of the rebel States, the President, on the 20th of December, sent in a message which Mr. Sumner characterized as an attempt to "whitewash" the unhappy condition of the rebel States. The message of the President was accompanied by reports from General Grant and General Schurz, in which Congress found evidence that the late rebels had little sense of national obligation, and were chiefly anxious to regain political power, and compensate themselves for the loss of slavery by keeping the negroes in abject servitude.

The passage of the Freedmen's Bureau Bill, by a large majority in Congress, and its veto by the President, presents the next phase in the contest. To Republicans the most alarming feature in the Veto Message was the evidence it gave that the President was ready at once to give to traitors who had fought fiercely for four years to destroy the Union an equal voice with loyal men in determining the terms of its reconstruction.

In this instance the President prevailed. The bill failed to pass over the veto, from the fact that six Senators—Dixon, Doolittle, Morgan, Norton, Stewart, and Van Winkle—who had voted for the bill, now sided with the President. This was the first and last triumph of the President.