On his “Swing Around the Circle” in summer 1866 to drum up support for his party before that year’s midterms, President Andrew Johnson denounced Congress as an illegal body, called certain Republican members of Congress traitors who should be hanged, and compared himself both to his martyred predecessor Abraham Lincoln and to Jesus Christ. In those days, the Democrats were the party of slavery and secession, while the young Republican Party stood firm on the Declaration of Independence. Johnson was a former Democrat from Tennessee, placed on the 1864 “National Union Party” ticket to emphasize unity in the fight to save the United States, and became an accidental president after Lincoln’s assassination. Johnson had broken from his Confederate neighbors because he was happy to see the end of the institution of human enslavement even though he had enslaved people himself until 1863. He believed slavery enabled a few rich men to monopolize the nation’s wealth, shutting out poorer white men like him. When he became president in April 1865, in the last days of the Civil War, he supported the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution. But that was as far as he went with the Republican plans for a future in which every man, regardless of race, would have the right to the fruits of his own labor. Johnson opposed the party’s growing support for Black rights and intended to reconstruct the United States on the basis of white supremacy. In one of the nation’s most unfortunate series of events, Johnson took office while Congress was out of session. It would not reconvene until December. After Lincoln’s death, Republican members of Congress rushed to Washington, D.C., expecting Johnson would call them into special session as Lincoln had done in summer 1861, but Johnson declined to do so, intending to “restore” the nation on his own terms. Johnson set out to resuscitate the prewar political system dominated by the Democratic Party, with himself at its head. Over the course of the summer, he pardoned all but about fifteen hundred former Confederates, either by proclamation or by presidential pardon, returning them to positions of authority in southern society. He required only that southern states ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, declare secession illegal, and default on Confederate debts before they could be readmitted to the Union. Since he pardoned ex-Confederates and refused to endorse Black voting, Johnson guaranteed that the same men who had taken the South out of the Union would be responsible for bringing it back in. Southern leaders half-heartedly met the president’s demands, then joined him in trying to re-create the world of the Old South. Within each state, through a series of laws together dubbed “Black Codes,” they bound formerly enslaved people to white employers and guaranteed the dominance of white people in the South. In Mississippi, for example, Black men could be arrested and fined if they did not sign yearlong contracts, then “hired out” to anyone who paid their fines—a system that essentially threatened uncooperative Black Americans with new language for an old system of forced labor. Nowhere could a Black person testify against a white person in court, so they had no recourse against theft, rape, assault, or even murder. Republicans looked on, aghast, as Johnson and white southerners took only months to erase the hard-earned fruits of victory in the Civil War. Adding insult to injury, the 1870 census would count Black Americans as whole persons rather than three-fifths of a person, as they had been counted before the war, meaning the South’s representation in the House of Representatives would increase. If Johnson’s plan were permitted to go forward unchallenged, wealthy southern whites would be more powerful after the Civil War than they had been before it. When Congress reconvened in early December, Johnson cheerfully informed the members that the country had been reconstructed. All that remained to do, he announced, was for Congress to admit newly elected southern representatives—including many of the same men who had taken the South out of the Union—to their seats. They were already in Washington, marveling at the changes the war years had wrought on what only four years before had been a sleepy southern town. Republicans had no intention of allowing the South to win the peace after losing the war. Congress refused to seat the South’s representatives and appointed a committee of fifteen members to come up with a better plan than Johnson’s for rebuilding the nation. The Committee of Fifteen spent months hearing testimony from southerners, white and Black, about conditions in their war-torn region. Finally, on the last day of April 1866, members of the committee introduced the joint resolution that would become the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. The amendment recognized that every man was equal before the law and that any person born or naturalized in America—except “Indians not taxed”—was an American citizen. To address the problem of the upcoming 1870 census, the committee proposed that congressional representation for the southern states be based on population, as with all states, but that southern representation be reduced in proportion to the number of men a state refused to allow to vote. The committee prohibited from holding elected office anyone who had sworn to support the Union and then broken that oath in order to join the Confederacy. The amendment also closed loopholes that southern states had found to protect their war debt. Finally, like the amendment that preceded it, the Fourteenth Amendment increased the strength of the federal government by giving Congress the power to enforce its provisions. Both chambers of Congress agreed to the amendment on June 18, 1866, and sent it off to the states for ratification. Congress required southern states to ratify the amendment before being readmitted to the Union. Johnson hated the proposed Fourteenth Amendment. He hated its broad definition of citizenship; he hated its assertion of national power; he hated its disfranchisement of the southern leaders he backed. Most of all, though, he hated that it offered a moderate route to reunification that could be supported by most Americans. If it were ratified by the states, it would destroy his chances of rebuilding a dominant national Democratic Party. Johnson told southern politicians to ignore Congress. Democrats would win the 1866 midterm congressional elections, he assured them, and once back in power, they would reject Republican “radicalism” and allow Johnson’s plan for reconstruction of the Union to proceed. As he asserted his vision for the country, Johnson egged on white supremacist violence. In July, white mobs attacked a Unionist convention in New Orleans where delegates had called for taking the vote away from ex-Confederates and giving it to loyal Black men. The rioters killed thirty-seven Black people and three white delegates to the convention. By then, Johnson had become as unpopular as his policies. Increasingly isolated, he defended his plan for the nation as the only true course. In late August he broke tradition to campaign in person, an act at the time considered beneath the dignity of a president. He set off on a railroad tour, known as the Swing Around the Circle, to whip up support for the Democrats before the election. Speaking from the same set of notes as the train stopped at different towns and cities from Washington, D.C., to New York, to Chicago, to St. Louis, and back to Washington, Johnson complained bitterly about the opposition to his reconstruction policies, attacked specific members of Congress as traitors and called for them to be hanged, and described himself as a martyr like Lincoln. And, noting the mercy of his reconstruction policies, he likened himself to Jesus. It was all too much for voters. The white supremacist violence across the South horrified them, the restoration of power to southern whites infuriated them, the reduction of Black soldiers to quasi-slaves enraged them, and Johnson’s attacks on Congress alarmed them. Johnson seemed determined to hand the country over to its former enemies to re-create the antebellum world that northerners had just poured more than 350,000 lives and $5 billion into destroying, no matter what voters wanted. Johnson’s extremism and his supporters’ violence created a backlash. Northerners were not willing to hand the country back to the Democrats who were rioting in the South and to a president who compared himself to Jesus. Rather than turning against the Republicans in the 1866 elections, voters repudiated Johnson. They gave Republicans a two-thirds majority of Congress, enabling them to override any policy Johnson proposed. And, in 1868, the states ratified the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, launching a new era in the history of the United States. You’re currently a free subscriber to Letters from an American. If you need help receiving Letters, changing your email address, or unsubscribing, please visit our Support FAQ. You can also submit a help request directly. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription.
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