On 7 January 1867 the U. S. Senate listened to President Johnson’s veto message
on the bill enfranchising blacks in the District of Columbia,
and then they voted to over-ride it 29-10.
The next day the House voted 113-38 to make it law.
In February the blacks in DC voted for the first time.
On January 10 the Congress extended suffrage to all men in the territories.
Also on January 7 James Ashley of Ohio supported by Thaddeus Stevens
presented an impeachment resolution to the U. S. House of Representatives, saying,
I charge him with a usurpation of power
and violation of law:
In that he has corruptly used the appointing power;
In that he has corruptly used the pardoning power;
In that he has corruptly used the veto power;
In that he has corruptly disposed of public property
of the United States;
In that he has corruptly interfered in elections,
and committed acts which,
in contemplation of the Constitution,
are high crimes and misdemeanors.1
The House that day by a vote of 108-38 referred it to the Judiciary Committee.
Congress would receive petitions for Johnson’s removal throughout the year.
On January 19 the New York Times reported that the U. S. Senator Sumner had said,
The President has usurped
the power of Congress on a colossal scale,
and he has employed those usurped powers
in facilitating a rebel spirit
and awakening anew the dying fires of the rebellion.2
On January 18 the Hudson River Railroad and the Harlem Railroad
suspended their relationship with the New York Central Railroad.
Vanderbilt declined to sue but imposed a Central blockade,
and the next day the Hudson River and the Harlem railroads agreed to a new contract,
ending a brief “railroad war.”
On March 30 Hudson River shareholders issued new shares worth nearly $7 million.
Vanderbilt claimed he reduced Harlem’s expenses by $1.6 million per year.
Some journalists criticized the manipulative Vanderbilt.
Johnson had appointed Henry Smythe the collector of the New York Customs House
in 1866 after he agreed to pay $5,000 to the U. S. Senators,
Johnson’s son-in-law
David Patterson of Tennessee and the loyal James Doolittle.
Smythe replaced nearly 400 Republican employees, and he received paybacks
from warehouse leases that gave him $40,000 a year.
In March a House resolution recommended removing Smythe,
and Johnson kept him on to the end of his term.
On January 28 the U. S. House of Representatives voted to submit two proposals
for manhood voting except for former Confederates and to remove
the southern governments Johnson had approved.
On that day Rep. George W. Julian persuaded many that only federal control
would enable loyal public opinion to grow
with the help of northern capital, labor, and enterprise.
The Joint Committee agreed to impose military rule on the South.
Also on the 28th General Thomas J. Wood testified on law enforcement
in Mississippi to a House committee saying,
Taking the whole code of laws of Mississippi,
civil and criminal, including the police laws,
which discriminate between white men and black men,
and taking the condition of public sentiment
with the masses of the people,
although there are some good people disposed to do justice,
I do not think the administration of justice,
as the laws are applied is sufficient
to secure the rights of liberty and property
and the pursuits of peace to the freed people.3
On January 29 General Ulysses S. Grant advised War Secretary Stanton
to put Texas under martial law.
On February 5 the U. S. Congress approved the Habeas Corpus Act
that expanded the role of federal courts, and they abolished peonage
which was making someone work until a debt was paid.
The House Judiciary Committee began secret hearings on February 6.
The detective Lafayette Baker, who helped catch John Wilkes Booth, testified that
Johnson had committed treason, bribery, and prostitution, but he provided no evidence.
Baker also said that he thought that the Presidents Harrison and Taylor
had been poisoned by their successors.
Baker had been in charge of the secret police; and after Johnson learned that
he was spying on the President for Stanton, Johnson fired Baker.
Congress approved the statehood of Nebraska on February 8 on the condition
that they change their constitution which had denied the vote to those not white.
On March 1 Nebraska became the 37th state.
In 1860 about 28,000 people lived in the Nebraska Territory,
and the Homestead Act of 1862 facilitated growth for about 100,000 by 1867.
President Johnson was concerned that two more senators would cause his conviction
after impeachment and tried to stop it,
but the Congress over-rode his veto.
On February 12 Rep. John A. Bingham proposed re-admitting southern states
after they ratified the 14th Amendment;
James G. Blaine suggested they should disenfranchise those who supported the rebellion;
and the House passed a bill with both measures.
Amendments by Wilson and Shellabarger widened disenfranchisement
and declared that the state governments in the South were provisional
and subject to the authority of the United States.
About five of six white men in the South lost their right to vote.
Then they passed the military bill.
These were combined into the Reconstruction Act which passed both houses
and declared that ten states which had seceded did not have legal governments.
Tennessee had agreed to the 14th Amendment and had been readmitted into the Union.
Grant in January had asked General Oliver Otis Howard to make a list
of authenticated murders, and on February 15 Navy Secretary Welles
and President Johnson dismissed the list and hid it from the Congress.
On March 2 President Johnson vetoed the Reconstruction bill.
He challenged the view that those states did not have legal governments.
He believed that they had the executive, legislative, and judicial powers of a free state,
and he complained that it put their people “under the absolute domination of military rulers.”
He feared that the military officers would be despotic, and it would be unconstitutional
because the citizens would be denied a trial by juries in a lawful court.
The Congress over-rode his veto on the same day.
Two days later Grant in a letter to Elihu Washburne called it
“one of the most ridiculous veto messages that ever emanated from any president.”4
To avoid being impeached Johnson fulfilled his duty to execute the law.
On that busy March 2 the Congress passed the Army Appropriation Act
with an amendment that required the President to channel military orders
through the General of the Army who could not be removed without the Senate’s consent.
This gave more power to Grant who called Johnson’s veto the “most ridiculous” one ever.
The Tenure of Office Act would prevent the President from removing any executive
officer who had been confirmed by the Senate,
and the Congress passed it over Johnson’s veto on March 2.
The Act also defined such illegal removals as “high crimes and misdemeanors.”
Also on March 2 the U. S. Congress repealed excise taxes,
and they eliminated tax on income under $1,000 a year.
By 1865 excise and income taxes had accounted for 63% of federal revenues.
Also on March 2 Congress passed An Act to Provide Increased Revenue from
Imported Wool that the National Association of Wool Manufacturers wanted.
White Congregationalists with Oliver Howard started Howard University near
Washington DC open to all blacks of both sexes and all ages,
and the U. S. Congress chartered it on March 2.
That month the Atlanta Baptist minister William Jefferson White founded for black students
the Augusta Institute at Augusta, Georgia that later became Morehouse College in Atlanta.
They offered degrees in education and divinity to prepare teachers and ministers.
On March 4 the Cleveland Leader reported that John D. Rockefeller had formed
a partnership with the chemist Samuel Andrews and the industrialist Henry Morrison Flagler.
Congress on March 23 passed over the President’s veto again
the Second Military Reconstruction Act which authorized the military commanders
to remove or suspend anyone holding an office in the “rebel states”
and to appoint their replacements.
These removals could be reviewed by the General of the Army but not by the President.
On March 26 the ailing and elderly Thaddeus Stevens had a colleague read
his long speech for a bill to provide 40 acres of confiscated land to freedmen,
and copies of the speech were sent to be read at Union League meetings in the South.
On the 27th military rule was imposed on Alabama
because the state had failed to ratify the 14th Amendment.
On March 29 the Pulaski Citizen in Tennessee published an article on the
“Invisible Empire of the South” breaking the news that the Ku Klux Klan had formed.
Jefferson Davis in March was granted $100,000 bail.
Most of the money was raised by Horace Greeley, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and Gerrit Smith,
and after two years in prison Davis was released on May 11.
Secretary of State Seward negotiated a treaty with Russia for the purchase of Alaska
for $7.2 million that was signed on March 30
and was approved by the U. S. Senate on April 9.
Congress debated the controversial purchase
and did not appropriate the funds to pay for it until July 14.
Russia officially transferred the 586,412 square miles of territory
to the United States on October 18.
People who doubted the value of the ice-bound land, which was purchased for
about two cents an acre, called the deal “Seward’s Folly.”
He also made an agreement with Denmark in July
to buy the two Virgin Islands in the West Indies.
Denmark and the people there wanted to vote on the proposed annexation,
and in January 1868 the people on both islands voted overwhelmingly for the transfer.
By the Third Reconstruction Act ten Confederate states were divided into five
military districts, and the commanders could enforce the law and supervise elections.
Johnson appointed the generals John Schofield in Virginia, Daniel Sickles in the Carolinas,
John Pope in Georgia, Florida and Alabama, Edward Ord in Mississippi and Arkansas,
and Phil Sheridan in Louisiana and Texas.
Schofield opposed the 14th Amendment and mostly helped Republicans
that he considered “respectable.”
Sickles nullified South Carolina’s Black Code by ruling that
all laws are to be applied the same to all inhabitants.
Pope wanted to help blacks; and after he allowed them to be on juries, Johnson replaced him.
Ord was against the Reconstruction Act,
and he advised freedmen to work rather than discuss politics.
Sheridan ordered blacks on juries and streetcars desegregated,
and mayors were to have half their police forces be Union veterans including blacks.
On March 27 Sheridan had dismissed the New Orleans mayor, Louisiana’s attorney general,
and a district judge for complicity in the riot of July 1866.
New constitutions were to be written and had to be approved by a majority
of registered voters, and the 14th Amendment had to be ratified
for a state to send representatives to Congress.
Passage of the radical Reconstruction Act inspired black longshoremen in Charleston,
Savannah, Mobile, Richmond, and New Orleans to go on strike,
and it soon spread to other black workers.
Many blacks refused to pay taxes to the South Carolina government.
Some blacks challenged the discrimination in urban streetcars.
Demonstrations against Jim Crow “Star Cars” in New Orleans persuaded
General Sheridan to end racial discrimination on street cars in May.
Before Congress adjourned on March 3, the House Judiciary Committee
had not reported anything on the case, and they recommended continuing the inquiry.
In early June the committee voted 5-4 not to approve the impeachment articles.
Radicals on the subcommittee listed 17 charges against Johnson,
and they elected Ben Wade of Ohio as Senate president pro tempore.
With no Vice President if they could remove Johnson,
Wade would become President.
Union Leagues formed in the South after the war ended.
Prior to the Reconstruction Act some blacks had emigrated to Liberia,
and now that practically stopped.
The Leagues were secret to protect them from the violence of the secret Ku Klux Klan
groups that white supremacists formed.
During this new era of Reconstruction many blacks paraded on July 4
to celebrate their equal rights.
At this time blacks were a majority of the people in
South Carolina, Mississippi, and Louisiana.
The first post-war legislature in South Carolina had 87 blacks and 40 whites
in the lower house while whites controlled the senate.
Louisiana from 1868 to 1896 had 133 black legislators including 38 senators.
They were only a little under half in Alabama, Florida, and Georgia,
and about 40% in Virginia and North Carolina;
they were only about a quarter of the population in Texas, Tennessee, and Arkansas.
The term “carpetbaggers” was used for those who came from the North
to join the southern Republicans and in a wider sense included northerners
who had come to the South before Reconstruction.
Northerners were only about 2% of the population of the eleven former Confederate states.
Of the 60 carpetbaggers who were elected to Congress during Reconstruction
52 were veterans of the Union Army, and almost all of these came to the South before 1867.
A much larger group were the white “scalawags” who were born in the South
and joined the freedmen in the Republican Party.
Many southern Democrats were hostile to the carpetbaggers and the scalawags.
The scalawags gained control of the governments in Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, Texas,
and North Carolina and exerted much influence in Mississippi.
A few wealthy planters joined the Republicans such as Charles Hays in Alabama
who had fought for the Confederate Army, the slaveholder G. B. Burnett
in northern Georgia, and David L. Russell
who was the son of the biggest landowner in North Carolina.
The Confederate General James Longstreet did also
and brought many Confederate veterans with him.
Most of the scalawags had been Whigs and preferred Republicans over Democrats.
James L. Alcorn owned the biggest plantation on the Mississippi delta
and had begun backing black voting in 1865.
More and more blacks turned away from being ruled by scalawags
who began leaving the Republican Party.
During Reconstruction whites and blacks worked together in the Republican Party
to bring about a revolution in the South that gave many blacks
a taste of what freedom could be.
In March at a Republican convention in Charleston, South Carolina
free blacks from that city provided the leadership for the most radical program
that included internal improvements giving blacks and whites equal shares,
integrated schools, banning corporal punishment and imprisonment for debt,
and providing help for the aged, the sick, and the poor.
This was all paid for by heavy taxes on uncultivated land
so that it could be divided and sold to the poor.
In July the North Carolina state convention accepted the same policies.
In April in reaction to the Reconstruction Act the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) became
vigilantes who targeted politically active carpetbaggers, scalawags, and blacks.
In May the Klan elected Nathan Bedford Forrest the Grand Wizard of the Order.
Their first big parade wearing long white robes and peaked hats was on July 4.
That summer they had a secret conference to get better organized.
Some of the groups that joined the KKK were the White Brotherhood, the White League,
Pale Faces, Constitutional Guards, Black Cavalry, White Rose, and the ’76 Association.
According to the historian James Ford Rhodes their hierarchy included a Grand Dragon
for each state, Grant Titans for groups of counties, a Grand Giant for each county,
and Grand Cyclops for the dens.
Other leaders were called Genii, Hydras, Furies,
Goblins, Night Hawks, Magi, Monks, and Turks.
The members were Ghouls and wore white sheets to scare people
as the ghosts of dead Confederate soldiers.
By April 1868 attacks were being reported throughout the South.
The KKK operated in all 11 of the former Confederate states
as well as in Maryland, Missouri, and Kentucky.
The Knights of the White Camelia formed in Franklin, Louisiana on May 22
led by the Confederate Col. Alcibiades DeBlanc
In 1868 they met at New Orleans and established a Constitution and Ritual of the Order
that included overt commitment and loyalty to the “superior” white race
with “marked distinction” from African races.
Some scalawags such as Joseph E. Brown of Georgia wanted to get capital
from the North to invest in railroads, mining, factories, and cotton mills
to improve the southern economy.
A large portion of the white Republicans in the South were in East Tennessee, Missouri,
North Carolina, West Virginia, West Texas, northwest Arkansas, and northern Alabama.
On July 4 a convention met in the Georgia mountains and agreed on building railroads,
providing free public schools without racial prejudice,
and promoting immigration and capital from the North.
James W. Hunnicutt was a newspaper editor who fled from Virginia to the North
during the Civil War, and he returned and in 1866 founded the Richmond New Nation.
He advocated black suffrage and spoke at the political meetings of blacks.
He and his supporters were influential in the first Republican state convention
that met outdoors in Richmond in April 1867.
About a thousand blacks supported the confiscation of land for distribution
in order to help the poor and humble to rise.
Virginian moderates organized another convention in Richmond; blacks entered the hall, and
Hunnicutt criticized the moderates for opposing black suffrage and the 14th Amendment.
The convention moved outside and agreed to accept the April platform.
Free blacks and carpetbaggers influenced the
Louisiana state convention meeting at New Orleans.
They proposed to invite immigrants and capital, to support the 8-hour day for city mechanics,
to achieve equality before the law, and to repair the Mississippi River levees
for which the legislature would appropriate $4 million.
At the Republican state convention in Raleigh, North Carolina
the whites and black moderates outnumbered the radicals in the debate over confiscation,
and they compromised by agreeing to accept the decision of Congress.
On June 10 Senator Benjamin Wade made a speech in Kansas arguing that
with the slavery issue settled they should focus on the issues of capital and labor
because property needs to be more equally distributed.
On June 12 the U. S. Attorney General Stanbery issued judgments that commanders
could not remove officials who opposed Congressional Acts,
and he allowed former Confederates to vote.
On the 20th Johnson sent these as orders to the military commanders,
and General Grant directed his commanders to disregard them.
Thaddeus Stevens criticized the impeachment investigation for being too timid,
and in late June he urged them to consider Johnson’s “unlawful usurpation
of the conquered territory and his attempt to raise up states therein.”
Ferdinand V. Hayden was a surgeon in the Civil War and became a geologist
who in 1866 led an expedition to the Great Plains
sponsored by the Academy of Sciences of Philadelphia.
In his letter to the Commissioner of the General Land Office on 1 July 1867 he wrote,
Large portions of the Upper Missouri country,
especially along the Yellowstone River,
are now covered with the silicified trunks of trees,
sixty to seventy feet in length and two to four feet
in diameter, exhibiting the annual rings of growth
as perfect as in our recent elms or maples.
We are daily obtaining more and more evidence that
these forests may be restored again to a certain extent,
at least, and thus a belt or zone of country about 500 miles
in width east of the base of the mountains be redeemed.
It is believed, also, that the planting of ten or fifteen acres
of forest trees on each quarter section
will have a most important effect on the climate,
equalizing and increasing the moisture
and adding greatly to the fertility of the soil….
Much might also be said in regard to the influence
of woods in protecting the soil and promoting
the increase in number and the flow of springs,
but all I wish is to show the possibility of the power of man
to restore to these now treeless and almost rainless prairies
the primitive forests and the humidity
which accompanies them.5
That summer Lyman Abbott reported on the Freedmen’s Bureau
to an international anti-slavery convention at Paris that in the two previous years
the U. S. Government spent $5,278,000 serving freedmen.
In the previous five-years Freedmen’s, Missionary, and Church Associations
had contributed over $5.5 million with more than $1 million of it coming from abroad.
The Bureau had 46 hospitals with 5,292 beds and had spent over $2 million
treating ex-slaves and 450,000 cases of illness.
Grant and War Secretary Stanton worked together with Congress in July
to remove Johnson’s power over commanders on Reconstruction matters.
The House Judiciary Committee resumed impeachment hearings,
and on July 18 Grant contrasted his compassionate treatment of Lee to Johnson’s desire
to punish men for treason.
The next day the U. S. Congress passed over Johnson’s veto the Third Reconstruction Act
which authorized military governors to dismiss officials and to determine voter eligibility.
Then they adjourned and left the heat of Washington in late July.
On the 30th Grant approved Sheridan’s deposing the Texas governor
for having tolerated the violence in the state.
Then Sheridan removed most of the New Orleans City Council,
the city’s treasurer, and the police chief.
The U. S. Army had about 28,000 soldiers in the South by July,
and 8,700 of them were in Texas.
The number of posts were reduced from 207 in January to 101 by September
when the states of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi had a total of only 17 posts.
On August 1 Johnson asked Grant to remove Sheridan and replace Stanton
as Secretary of War.
Grant replied that he opposed removing Stanton but that he would do his duty.
Johnson also wanted to transfer General Philip Sheridan away from the military district
of Louisiana and Texas because he had tyrannically dismissed the governors of both states,
the mayor and the aldermen in New Orleans, and other elected officials.
Grant was very partial to Sheridan and Sherman.
He wrote a letter citing the Tenure of Office Act that required the Senate’s approval
to remove a Cabinet member, and he warned that removing Stanton and Sheridan
would divide the country again.
When the Congress was not in session, the President could remove an official.
On August 5 Johnson wrote to Stanton that his resignation would be accepted,
and Stanton responded that he would not resign.
Johnson’s letter on the 12th suspended Stanton
and made Grant the interim Secretary of War.
Five days later Johnson replaced Sheridan with the conservative General
Winfield Scott Hancock, and he sent Sheridan to replace Hancock at Fort Leavenworth.
On August 17 Grant wrote a letter criticizing these moves.
Johnson also removed General Daniel Sickles,
the commander of the North and South Carolina district.
Grant wrote to Johnson that he was defeating
the laws of Congress and endangering the country.
Johnson summoned him, and Grant withdrew the letter.
Johnson also extended the scope of his amnesty and pardons of former Confederates.
On August 30 the Missouri Democrat called it the “New Rebellion,”
and radical newspapers urged the removal of Johnson.
On the 29th Grant had issued Special Orders No. 429 to stop new district commanders
from restoring officials their predecessors had deposed.
The next day Grant’s August 17 letter opposing Sheridan’s transfer was
released to the press which reported that Grant had joined the radical Republicans.
Also in August the first congress of the National Labor Union met in Baltimore.
That month Andrew Cameron who edited the Working Man’s Advocate
delivered an address which he concluded saying,
We now extend a cordial invitation
to all to participate in our deliberations.
Come from the North and the South,
from the East and the West;
come from the anvil and the loom;
from the workbench and the forge,
every craft and every trade; come as the representatives
of states’ assemblies or trades’ unions,
singly or in delegations, all will be equally welcome;
come with fraternal greetings,
bearing the olive branch of peace;
come prompted by a common interest
and actuated by a common motive;
come forgetting the past and its issues,
ignoring alike the appeals and denunciations of partisanship;
come realizing the importance of the crisis
and the necessity of decided action;
come as lovers of a common country,
and help by your counsels and deliberations
to hasten that glorious time,When man to man the world o’er
Shall brothers be and a’ that.When worth, not wealth, shall rule mankind;
when tyranny and oppression of every character
shall be uprooted and destroyed;
and when the laborers of America, intelligent, united,
and disenthralled, shall occupy that proud position which
God in His kind providence intended they should occupy—
a position they never can aspire to
until the evils complained of are redressed
by and through their own exertions.
Finally, brethren, come one and all and help to marshal
those mighty forces of labor which,
when disciplined, will march to certain victory.6
In local elections that fall Democrats made gains
in the North and Midwest especially in New York and California.
They gained control of the Ohio legislature and would
later replace the radical Ben Wade in the U. S. Senate.
Voters in Ohio and Minnesota rejected referenda on black suffrage.
Kansas held two referenda on votes for Negroes and women; and despite
the efforts of Lucy Stone, Mrs. Stanton, and Anthony, both were defeated.
Influenced by the changed position of Horace Greeley, the New York
constitutional convention chose not to allow voting on a woman suffrage amendment
even though 28,000 signatures were presented.
In the South the newly enfranchised blacks turned out in large numbers
being nearly 90% of the voters in Virginia and about 70% in Georgia.
On November 25 the House Judiciary Committee voted 5-4
for the impeachment of Johnson, and on December 7
the House voted 57-108 defeating the impeachment resolution.
In Johnson’s annual message to Congress on December 3 he said,
Negroes have shown less capacity for government
than any other race of people.
No independent government of any form
has ever been successful in their hands.
On the contrary, wherever they have been left
to their own devices they have shown
a constant tendency to relapse into barbarism.7
He warned that blacks voting would lead to
“a tyranny such as this continent has never yet witnessed.”8
During 1867 over 700,000 blacks had become registered voters in the South.
South Carolina had 78,982 blacks registered and 46,346 whites.
Mississippi registered 60,167 Negroes and 46,636 whites.
Johnson in December replaced General Pope with General Meade in the
Georgia-Alabama-Florida district and General Ord with the
President’s friend Alvan C. Gillem in Mississippi and Arkansas.
Oliver Kelley had traveled in the south for the Bureau of Agriculture.
In November he mailed 300 copies of a proposal for an agricultural society,
and on December 4 he and others in Washington organized the
National Grange of the Patrons of Animal Husbandry to teach farmers better techniques,
and local chapters formed granges.
The movement expanded rapidly, and by 1874 they had about 800,000 members.
Also in 1867 on April 9 Andrew Carnegie organized the
Keystone Telegraph Company with $50,000 capital.
On June 15 John Stough Bobbs founded cholecystotomy
by operating to remove gallstones for the first time.
On August 28 the U. S. Navy Captain William Reynolds claimed the Midway Islands
in the North Pacific Ocean for the United States, and settlement would not begin until 1870.
On September 5 at the end of the railroad line at Abilene, Kansas
the Illinois meat entrepreneur Joseph M. McCoy made a contract with the Hannibal
and St. Joe Railroad for cattle shipped to Chicago.
Cattlemen began driving their herds north from Texas on the Chisholm Trail
and sold cattle for ten times their cost.
By fall about 35,000 cattle were being moved through the small town of Abilene
where the country had much water and grass.
The number sold increased to at least 70,000 in 1868,
160,000 cattle in 1869, and 300,000 in 1870.
On September 16 in Helena, Montana
some whites burned to death “Chinese Mary” to get her gold.
In 1867 the U. S. Congress invalidated all the legislation of
two of the Montana Territory’s sessions.
John Muir in September set off on his thousand-mile walk from Indianapolis
to the Gulf of Mexico, and he began keeping his first journal.
On October 17 Albion Tourgée as a candidate for the North Carolina
constitutional convention published his principles.
Here are the first seven of the ten:
1. Equality of civil and political rights to all citizens.
2. No property qualifications for jurymen.
3. Every voter eligible for election
to any office of trust or emolument.
4. All legislative, executive, and judicial officers of the state
to be filled by the vote of the people.
5. A criminal code humane and Christian, without whip or stocks.
6. An ample system of public instruction reaching from
the lowest primary school to the highest university course,
free to the children of every citizen.
7. A uniform ad valorem system of taxation upon property.9
In December the 73-year-old railway magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt found ways
to make the stock of the New York Central Railroad go down
so that he could buy enough shares to take control.
Railways were spreading.
Cable was used to pull cars up hills in San Francisco.
John Eads used steel to build a bridge across the Mississippi River at St. Louis.
John Roebling extended steel cable to bridge the Ohio River from Kentucky to Cincinnati,
and he started designing the Brooklyn Bridge.
The poor were living in slums in New York City,
and the first tenement-house laws were passed.
Andrew Carnegie and George Pullman merged companies to form the
Pullman Palace Car Corporation in Chicago.
Carnegie’s steel had helped build railway cars,
and Pullman had designed the first sleeper-car in 1863.
Pullman maintained control over the cars by leasing them instead of selling them.
The Central Pacific Railroad began using liquid nitroglycerine instead of gunpowder
as a more effective way of boring the tunnel through the High Sierra Mountains.
George Peabody rose from a poor family in Massachusetts
to make a fortune in dry goods and banking.
He had moved to London to be at the center of banking in 1837.
In 1851 he loaned money to the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace in London.
He often returned to the United States for visits, and his charitable work increased
after he formed the Peabody Institute in 1852.
In 1867 he started the Peabody Education Fund with $3.5 million
to promote education for destitute children in the South.
In San Francisco 2,000 Chinese went on strike for higher pay, and their efforts failed.
On June 25 about 5,000 Chinese workers on the Central Pacific Railroad in California
near the Nevada border went on strike for the $40 per month
made by whites who were mostly Irish.
In the spring the Chinese had gained a pay increase from $31 to $35.
The Chinese went back to work on July 2 without another gain in pay.
The Mormon Tabernacle was completed in Salt Lake City, Utah.
New York became the first state to establish a free public school system.
Universities were founded at Urbana in Illinois, Morgantown in West Virginia,
and at Atlanta in Georgia.
Three abolitionists published Negro spirituals as Slave Songs of the United States.
William Wells Brown wrote The Negro in the American Rebellion:
His Heroism and His Fidelity.
Lydia Maria Child published her novel A Romance of the Republic that described
an interracial marriage, and Rebecca Harding Davis wrote Waiting for the Verdict.
Horatio Alger Jr. began publishing his Ragged Dick Series of dime novels
showing how poor people could lift themselves up by virtue and thrift.
Joseph G. McCoy dealt in livestock at Chicago,
and he bought 450 acres at Abilene, Kansas for $2,250.
He promised Texas ranchers that he would pay $40 a head for cattle
that they could sell in Texas for only $4 a head.
The Kansas Pacific railway agreed to charge him only one-eighth the usual freight expense
on every cattle car he shipped to the East.
William Louden in Iowa invented a rope sling and a wooden monorail hay carrier
to greatly reduce the labor in dairy farming.
The Reconstruction Acts called for ten state constitutional conventions,
and all but two of these met between
5 November 1867 (Alabama) and 20 January 1868 (Florida).
Virginia elected delegates to a convention on 22 October 1867 and met in Richmond
from December 3 to 17 April 1868.
The Texas convention met on 1 June 1868
and produced the last constitution in February 1869.
After each convention elections were held to vote on ratification
and then on new governments.
State officials from the Confederate era were excluded,
and that enabled southern white Unionists (scalawags), Republicans from the North
(carpetbaggers), free blacks, and freedmen
to become most of the delegates at the conventions.
Most southern conservatives boycotted the elections that selected the delegates.
The Reconstruction Acts required a majority of registered voters for ratification
of the new constitutions, and whites could defeat them by intimidating voters.
Southern Unionists were the largest group of delegates,
and about one-sixth were carpetbaggers who were lawyers and professionals.
Union Army veterans provided leadership with southern Unionists and free blacks.
Most delegates wanted to create a nobler civilization that would endure.
In Virginia 105,000 freemen and 120,000 whites registered to vote for delegates.
Of the thousand or so delegates who were elected, 265 were black,
and of those 107 had been born as slaves; 40 or more had fought for the Union Army,
and 28 were not from the South.
In South Carolina and Louisiana black delegates outnumbered the whites,
and their free blacks provided useful experience.
Blacks were almost 40% of the delegates in Florida, about 20% in Alabama, Georgia,
Mississippi, and Virginia, and 10% in Arkansas, North Carolina, and Texas.
Georgia’s 22 black delegates included 17 ministers,
and a third of Virginia’s blacks had gained their freedom before 1860.
In South Carolina many blacks refused to sign labor contracts for 1868
because they were hoping to be given land.
Moderate Republicans predominated in Georgia and Florida.
Most of the conventions abolished property qualifications
and residency requirements for voting.
They also established free public education,
and blacks often supported a poll tax to pay for that.
South Carolina and Texas made attending school compulsory.
Schools were not going to be racially integrated,
yet not one constitution required separate schools.
Many constitutions provided for penitentiaries, asylums for orphans and the insane,
and some for relieving the poor.
Every constitution guaranteed equal civil and political rights for blacks.
Most constitutions banned whipping, voice voting, and imprisonment for debt.
Florida allowed Seminoles to elect two representatives.
Fewer crimes were capital offenses.
All but one constitution recognized a wife’s property rights
in order to protect husbands from creditors.
South Carolina legalized divorce.
Interracial marriage was a controversial topic,
and blacks noted that many planters had children by female slaves.
Equal access to public accommodations was a mixed issue
as many whites resisted social equality.
The constitutions mandated the election of judges.
Georgia, Florida, and North Carolina ended the disenfranchisement of Confederates
while it was greatly reduced in Texas and South Carolina.
The 14th Amendment when ratified in July 1868 would protect civil and political equality.
Virginia rejected ratification in January 1867,
and Mississippi and Texas did not ratify the amendment until 1870.
Alabama authorized a Bureau of Industrial Resources to promote economic development,
and North Carolina mandated $2 million for railroads.
Georgia’s convention in Atlanta decided to make that city their capital
Every state except Louisiana allowed a homestead tax exemption
between $1,500 and $5,000.
Blacks were for lower exemptions so that
large landowners would give up some of their land.
Most of the constitutions called for a general property tax.
Texas with much public land offered free homesteads to settlers,
and Mississippi could sell land that was repossessed for taxes in tracts up to 160 acres.
Louisiana limited lots to 50 acres and not how many a person could buy.
Settlers in the far west called the Northern Paiute, Bannock,
and Western Shoshone tribes “Snakes.”
General George Crook led the U. S. Army against them about 50 times
during the Snake War in southeast Oregon and southwest Idaho from December 1866
until they met at Fort Harney on 1 July 1868.
Crook explained that his dead soldiers could be replaced quickly,
and thus the U. S. Army could kill the Snakes’ warriors before young braves grew up.
This persuaded the Snakes to stay near Fort Harney where they received their rations.
In January 1867 Senator James Doolittle’s committee published a report
based on nearly two-years’ work which concluded that “lawless whites”
were interfering in native hunting lands, and the committee advised removing tribes
to isolated reservations where they could farm away from the routes of the settlers.
General Sherman in a letter to General Grant on January 15 proposed separate districts
for whites and Indians with the Sioux north of the Platte, west of the Missouri River,
and east of the road to Montana.
Other tribes including the Cheyenne and Arapaho would have other districts.
Sherman wrote,
This would leave for our people exclusively
the use of the wide belt, east and west,
between the Platte and the Arkansas,
in which lie the two great railroads and over which
passes the bulk of travel to the mountain territories.10
He warned that if Indians hunted in the white area,
there would be the danger of more conflicts and troubles.
Grant endorsed the plan and gave it to the War Department advising that
the Pacific Railroad needed to be protected.
He also advised that the Indian Bureau be transferred to the War Department
so that traders would not be licensed,
and so the army could keep weapons and ammunition away from the Indians.
On February 1 Grant warned Johnson and his cabinet,
If the present practice is to be continued, I do not see that
any course is left open to us but to withdraw our troops
to the settlements, and call upon Congress to provide
the means and troops to carry on formidable hostilities
against the Indians until all the Indians or all the whites
upon the Great Plains and between the settlements
on the Missouri and the Pacific slope are exterminated.11
Sherman wrote to Grant that either they or the Indians must be masters on the Plains.
President Johnson in February approved a commission to find a peaceful way
to end the war with Red Cloud, and he told General Sherman to be patient.
On March 2 Grant ordered Sherman to prepare for abandoning the forts Phil Kearny,
Reno, and Fetterman, and Grant explained to Stanton
that this area was more important to the Indians than to the whites.
General Winfield Scott Hancock commanded the Missouri Department
that included Kansas, Colorado, and New Mexico.
He invited Cheyenne chiefs to a conference on April 7, and few came.
General George Armstrong Custer in the Smoky Hill area found that
most of the stage stations had been burned or abandoned.
Two men told him they thought it was Pawnee Fork bands.
Custer sent a dispatch to Hancock, who went against the advice of the Cheyenne agent
Major Edward Wynkoop and his officers and ordered their villages burned.
Custer discovered that his information was wrong and sent another dispatch.
Wynkoop reported to the Indian Department that the Pawnee Fork bands
had been punished unjustly.
Hancock marched soldiers to a Cheyenne and Sioux village, and the chiefs fled.
He assumed a war had begun, and he sent Custer with the 7th Cavalry to pursue them
in Kansas where the Indians raided.
Hancock went to Fort Dodge to meet Kiowa chiefs.
The young and peaceful Kicking Bird was vying
with the aggressive Satanta to be the new chief.
After the meeting with Kicking Bird on April 23 Satanta arrived six days later
and persuaded Hancock to accept him,
and the general proved it by giving Satanta a major general’s blue coat.
As a result of these errors some Oglala and militant Cheyenne (Dog Soldiers) in this area
became hostile and attacked stage coaches and killed at least a hundred settlers.
On June 17 the generals Sherman and Custer met,
and the latter disobeyed the commander’s orders, causing confusion.
Lt. Lyman Kidder with ten men and a Lakota scout went looking for Custer
and were all killed by Oglala hunters and Dog Soldiers on July 2 in Kansas.
On July 20 President Johnson signed the Henderson bill for a peace commission
to negotiate with the Plains Indians.
General Sherman advised General Grant that the Hancock expedition had failed
and that commissions could not meet with fighting Indians.
In September the commissioners traveled up the Missouri River,
and because of low water they met only with friendly Northern Cheyenne
and Brulé Lakota Chief Spotted Tail, warning them
not to interfere with the Union Pacific Railroad.
The commissioners moved on to Nebraska.
Red Cloud and the 36-year-old Sitting Bull in the spring
had become the main war chiefs of the Oglala Lakotas.
Red Cloud did not want soldiers and settlers traveling through their land
on the Bozeman Trail, and he demanded that military garrisons be removed
from Fort Phil Kearny and Fort C. F. Smith.
After their annual sun dance in July about 650 Cheyenne and Lakota
resumed fighting on August 1 against hay-cutters near Fort C. F. Smith in Montana,
and at least 20 Indians and 3 whites were killed.
The next day a thousand Lakota Sioux fought wood-cutters near Fort Phil Kearny
in the Wyoming Territory, and each side suffered a dozen or more casualties.
On the 4th Cheyenne fought against Union Pacific Railroad workers in Nebraska.
Some chiefs ended hostilities by accepting gifts and going home.
The U. S. Peace Commissioners found that over 2,500 Indians had gathered
near Medicine Lodge, Kansas, and on October 19 Senator Henderson offered
to give them homes on good farm land,
and Satanta replied that would make their land smaller.
Commissioner Taylor explained that with the buffalo depleted they would have to farm.
The Comanches and Kiowas were given 2.9 million acres in the Indian Territory,
and 19 chiefs put an X on the document. The Cheyenne arrived on October 27, and the next day
Henderson said the Cheyenne-Arapaho Reservation would be 4.3 million acres
in the Indian Territory.
Two more treaties were signed, and Henderson left off the written treaty
the promise that they would be allowed to hunt off the reservation.
When promised rations did not arrive in February 1868,
the Kiowas and Comanches raided Texas.
The Cheyenne attacked settlements along the Saline and Solomon rivers in Kansas.
After Colorado’s Gov. Frank Hall reported that 79 settlers had been killed,
General Philip Sheridan replaced Hancock in August 1868.
He learned in September that over 2,000 Indians in the West from Texas to Kansas had gone
on the warpath and had killed 147 American settlers and abducted 426 women and children,
destroying 24 ranches, massacring 4 wagon trains, and attacking 11 stagecoaches.
Sheridan sent Major George A. Forsyth with 50 cavalry, and they killed the Northern
Cheyenne chief Woqini (Hook Nose) at the Arikara Fork of the Republican River.
Then Oglala Sioux and Cheyenne and Arapaho allies besieged the soldiers on that island
for eight days until the 10th Cavalry rescued them on September 25.
On November 22 General Sheridan sent General Custer with 574 men of the
7th Cavalry to attack a camp of about 250 Arapaho and Cheyenne led by
Chief Black Kettle with 150 warriors at Washita River in the Indian Territory.
Black Kettle had signed the Medicine Lodge Treaty on 28 October 1867;
he tried to negotiate with Custer but was shot dead.
At Washita River on November 27 Custer’s 7th Cavalry slaughtered about a hundred men
and 75 women and children while they lost 21 soldiers killed with 13 wounded.
On December 20 many Comanche and Kiowa warriors arrived at Fort Cobb.
On December 25 in a battle at Soldier Spring, Oklahoma
only one person was killed on each side.
The Oglala Sioux Chief Red Cloud demanded that
the three forts on the Bozeman Trail be abandoned.
The Sioux and Arapaho chiefs negotiated with U. S. commissioners an extensive treaty,
which created the Great Sioux Reservation covering the western half of what became
South Dakota, and the treaty was signed at Fort Laramie on 29 April 1868.
Red Cloud informed U. S. commissioners that he would go to Fort Laramie
to discuss peace, and he sent this message:
The Great Father sent his soldiers out here to spill blood.
I did not first commence the spilling of blood….
If the Great Father kept white men out of my country,
peace would last forever,
but if they disturb me, there will be no peace….
The Great Spirit raised me in this land,
and has raised you in another land.
What I have said I mean. I mean to keep this land.12
The soldiers evacuated Fort C. F. Smith on July 29
followed by Fort Phil Kearny and Fort Reno on August 1.
The Cheyenne burned Fort Phil Kearny, and the Lakota destroyed Fort C. F. Smith.
By November 6 the treaty had been signed by
General Sherman, 156 Sioux, 25 Arapaho and 34 witnesses.
The U. S. Senate finally ratified this second Fort Laramie treaty on 16 February 1869.
On the 23 November 1868 the Commissioner of Indian Affairs
had issued a 380-page report.
Indians were to be restricted to districts and encouraged to work
in agriculture and manufacturing.
In addition to that Sioux reservation the other large reservation was the Indian Territory,
which later became Oklahoma, for the “civilized” nations that were removed
from the South as well as for the Cheyenne, Arapaho, Kiowa, and Comanche in the Plains.
Indian children were required to attend schools and learn English.
Women were taught how to sew, weave, and knit, and polygamy was to be punished.
The U. S. Government was to provide food, clothing, and other supplies
during the transition, and the three military bases on the tribal lands would be destroyed.
General William T. Sherman wrote to his brother, Senator John Sherman of Ohio,
“The more (Indians) we can kill this year, the less we will have to kill next year.”13
On 1 June 1868 the Navaho Wars ended as they agreed to live on the
Bosque Redondo Reservation near Fort Sumner in the New Mexico Territory.
The U. S. Senate ratified the treaty on June 24,
and President Johnson proclaimed it on August 12.
Although the reservation included 3.5 million acres,
excluded were the best land for farming and grazing and their four sacred mountains.
Even after it was quadrupled to 25,000 square miles,
only about 68,000 acres could be used for farmland.
In the next five years under the military the Navajo population of 10,000
decreased by 2,000 while the number of sheep diminished from 200,000 to 940.
On 2 March 1868 the Utes had made a treaty with the Commissioner
of the Indian Affairs Nathaniel Taylor of the United States,
Gov. Alexander C. Hunt of Colorado, Kit Carson representing the U. S.,
and the representatives of the Tabaquache, Muache, Capote, Weeminuche, Yampa,
Grand River, and Uintah bands of the Utes that granted them a reservation
of 16 million acres from the western Rockies in Colorado west to the Utah border
with hunting rights in North and Middle Parks.
For the next fiscal year ending in mid-1869 only $5,000 was appropriated
for the Uintah Agency even though the Indian agent Pardon Dodds
said that more than $20,000 was needed.
On 7 December 1867 the House of Representatives voted 106-57 to reject
Ashley’s resolution to impeach President Johnson.
On 13 January 1868 the U. S. Senate refused to agree to Johnson’s removal of Stanton
as Secretary of War and voted 36-6 to restore his office,
and Republicans persuaded Stanton to “stick” to his job.
The next day Grant left the War Department, and Stanton returned to his office.
Johnson felt betrayed by Grant.
On February 10 Thaddeus Stevens persuaded the House of Representatives
to transfer the impeachment records to the Reconstruction Committee,
and three days later he presented a new impeachment resolution
with a report on the Tenure of Office violation.
On February 21 Johnson dismissed Stanton and replaced him with
Adjutant General Lorenzo Thomas.
Stanton ordered Grant to arrest Thomas, and he refused.
Johnson informed the Senate that Thomas had replaced Stanton.
After a 7-hour secret debate the Senate voted 35-6 that the President
did not have the power to replace the Secretary of War.
The next morning before breakfast a U. S. Marshal arrested Thomas
for violating the Tenure Act.
Judge Harley Cartter set bail at $5,000, and two merchants posted it for Thomas.
He and Stanton confronted each other in Stanton’s office,
and then at a neutral office they shared drinks.
Stanton barricaded himself in his office while
Thomas attended Johnson’s Cabinet meetings as the interim War Secretary.
The New York Herald reported that violence against Stanton could bring
100,000 veterans to Washington to restore Stanton.
The Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) was the prominent veterans’ organization
and they promised to defend the Congress.
Stanton opposed the use of force and dismissed the 125 GAR veterans assigned to guard him.
The Reconstruction Committee met at the home of Stevens and voted for impeachment,
and George Boutwell drafted an impeachment resolution.
On February 24 the House of Representatives by a strictly party line
voted 126-47 to impeach President Johnson.
There would be 13 articles mostly on removing Stanton, and also for trying to give orders
to General Thomas without Grant’s approval, denying the authority of Congress,
and trying to bring it “into disgrace.”
The sub-committee’s first witness on the 26th was Adjutant General Lorenzo Thomas.
On that day Stanton’s lawyer Cartter told them that they wanted to stop the prosecution
of Thomas, and the case was dismissed.
On February 29 Boutwell presented ten impeachment articles in the House of Representatives.
The elderly Stevens closed the debate on March 2 saying,
“Never was a great malefactor so gently treated as Andrew Johnson.”14
Benjamin Butler accused Johnson of bringing the Congress and Presidency
“into contempt, ridicule, and disgrace,” and the House rejected that as an article
and approved nine articles by March 3.
Chief Justice Salmon Chase, who wanted to run for President,
presided over the trial of Andrew Johnson by the U. S. Senate that began on March 5.
The radical Senator pro tempore Ben Wade, who would become President
if the Senate convicted Johnson, might then
become the next Republican candidate for President.
Senators, who did not want Wade to be President,
were inclined to vote for Johnson’s acquittal.
For conviction they needed the votes of 36 of the 54 Senators.
With only 9 Democrats and 3 Republicans who regularly supported Johnson,
7 more Republicans would be needed for acquittal.
The leading House managers prosecuting the case were Butler, Bingham, Stevens,
and Boutwell, and the best lawyers in defense were the Attorney General Stanbery,
the former Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Curtis, the Democrat Jeremiah Black,
and the Republican William Evarts.
After a 3-hour debate on whether Ben Wade should be allowed to vote
because a conviction would make him President,
the Senate decided that they are a political body, and he could not be disqualified.
The President’s team raised money to pay the lawyers and bribe the senators voting.
Edmund Cooper of Tennessee was involved with three of those groups.
He had worked as Johnson’s secretary in the White House.
Then he was in Congress, and he lost after 5,000 blacks registered to vote in his district.
Cooper came back to the White House and worked with Post Office special agent
James Legate, Perry Fuller, and Willis Gaylord
who was related to Senator Pomeroy of Kansas.
Cooper said that for $40,000 Pomeroy and four other senators
would vote to acquit Johnson.
Pomeroy would be the model for
Mark Twain’s character Senator Dilworthy in The Gilded Age.
The printer Cornelius Wendell had been exposed for graft when Johnson named him
to be Superintendent of Public Printing in 1860.
He estimated they needed $150,000 to get Johnson off,
and he got Postmaster General Randall and Treasury Secretary McCulloch to raise money.
Johnson read over Addison’s play Cato which had inspired other American patriots
such as George Washington.
Johnson said, “This American Senate is as corrupt as was the Roman Senate.”15
On March 30 Butler began the prosecution
by reading his opening statement for three hours.
He emphasized the Stanton-Thomas conflict and the Tenure of Office Act
rather than the more general Article XI that Stevens had written.
After five days the prosecution completed their case on a Saturday.
Senator Grimes of Iowa hoped that Johnson would appoint a Secretary of War
who was politically acceptable.
In presenting the defense’s opening statement Justice Curtis spoke for three hours
on April 9 and for one more hour the next day.
He argued that Johnson had constitutional authority for firing Stanton,
and that he did not violate the Tenure of Office Act.
The galleries were crowded to hear the testimony of General Thomas,
and the popular General Sherman testified three times.
Stanbery came down with pleurisy and had to withdraw from the trial.
The Ku Klux Klan sent threatening letters in red ink to the House managers
Stevens, Bingham, and Logan of Illinois.
Butler also received several threats.
Evarts questioned Navy Secretary Welles who was very loyal to Johnson,
and Evarts concluded the defense case on April 18.
A Whiskey Ring led by the Kentucky lawyer Charles Woolley also worked on
bribing senators for the defense.
Johnson’s lawyers argued that the Tenure of Office Act did not apply to Stanton
because he was not appointed by Johnson but by President Lincoln.
Several moderate Republican Senators were favoring Johnson because
the Reconstruction Acts were being implemented
with the conventions and elections in the South.
Johnson let it be known through William Evarts, who was prosecuting Jefferson Davis,
that if Johnson was acquitted, he would stop obstructing the Republicans in the South.
Grimes suggested that Johnson appoint General Schofield as War Secretary.
He was the only military commander of a southern district that Johnson had not replaced.
Grant said he would accept Schofield; but he advised Schofield not to take the position,
and he declined it on April 25.
Closing arguments began on April 22.
Senators Grimes, Fessenden, and Trumbull were leaning toward acquittal.
Thurlow Weed appealed to Seward’s allies for money and found General Alonzo Adams
who had told Smythe that for $30,000 he could get three more votes for acquittal.
If Johnson was acquitted, the fund was also going to give him $50,000.
The defense was trying to win over John Henderson of Missouri;
and Grant told him that Johnson should be removed because he is a liar.
On May 11 the senators began explaining their votes in executive session;
and after speaking each one went out and answered questions
from reporters and the managers.
Henderson said he would vote against the first eight articles.
Because of an ill senator the voting was put off to May 16.
When Kansas Senator Jim Lane learned of evidence exposing his business corruption
with Fuller that he had denied, he had killed himself in July 1866.
The Kansas governor considered filling the seat with the printer,
Republican Edmund G. Ross, who had never held a public office.
Fuller used $40,000 for bribes to get Ross appointed for the last four years of the term
and as well as a full term for Pomeroy.
Seven southern states had fulfilled the requirements of Reconstruction
and had elected 14 senators who were ready to take their seats.
Pomeroy told Republicans that Ross would vote to convict;
but Ross provided the 19th vote that exonerated Johnson who within a few weeks
provided patronage positions for friends of Ross.
The Senate adjourned for ten days because of the Republican convention.
On May 26 three votes on additional articles also failed to convict,
and the trial was adjourned.
On 8 January 1868 the wealthy Democrat George Francis Train
sponsored a newspaper called The Revolution, which called for women’s rights
and urged women to join unions and demand equal pay for equal work.
On March 11 the U. S. Congress passed the Fourth Reconstruction Act
which required new state constitutions to be ratified by a majority of registered voters
in order for those states to be readmitted into the United States.
George W. Ashburn was born in the South in 1814,
and he opposed Georgia’s secession and became a colonel in the Union Army.
After the Civil War the military Gov. George G. Meade
appointed him a judge in Columbus, Georgia.
Ashburn presided over the Georgia Constitutional Convention in 1867 at Atlanta
that removed restrictions on the rights of Negroes.
He worked with black leaders in the Freedmen’s Bureau,
and his neighbors called him a “scalawag.”
Ku Klux Klan founder Nathan Bedford Forest visited Columbus on 21 March 1868.
Former Confederate General Henry Benning testified that Ashburn had left his wife
and taken up with a black woman in Columbus.
Ashburn attended a meeting of blacks and Republicans on March 30,
and after midnight five masked men murdered him at his home,
perhaps the first Klan murder in Georgia.
In June a Congressional Committee on Lawlessness and Violence reported
that 373 freed slaves had been killed in the previous two years,
and freedmen had killed ten whites.
Yet many people believed that the Ku Klux Klan had already killed
thousands of blacks and white radicals.
The Congress overcame Johnson’s vetoes to readmit Arkansas on June 22
and on the 25th with the Omnibus Act they restored the delegations of Alabama, Florida,
Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina, and South Carolina.
Also on June 25 the U. S. Congress cut back many operations of the Freedmen’s Bureau,
and they mandated the eight-hour day for government employees.
In private businesses most laborers still worked 10 or 12 hours per day.
On July 20 the U. S. Secretary of State William Seward certified that 28 states,
being more than three-quarters of all 37 states, by voting approval,
had ratified the 14th Amendment to the U. S. Constitution granting every person
due process and equal protection of the laws.
The U. S. Senate rejected woman suffrage in the District of Columbia by a vote of 37-9.
On July 25 Johnson signed the Organic Act that established the
Territory of Wyoming from parts of previous Dakota and Utah territories.
On the 28th Secretary of State Seward and Anson Burlingame,
who led the diplomats from China, signed a treaty allowing unlimited immigration from China.
Congress passed a bill over the President’s veto on July 28 that reorganized
Reconstruction and removed the Freedmen’s Bureau from states
which were readmitted into the Union.
In 1868 this would include Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, and the two Carolinas.
The Bureau had helped 130,735 students sign up for classes.
During Johnson’s presidency he vetoed 29 bills, and the Congress over-rode 15 of them.
President Johnson in early December every year sent a long message
to the U. S. Congress, and his fourth and last message on December 9 was no exception.
Usually they were read aloud to the House of Representatives and the Senate,
and this time radical Republicans were so upset by his rhetoric against them
that they stopped the reading after a few paragraphs and voted to adjourn.
Near the beginning of the message Johnson wrote,
It may be safely assumed as an axiom in the government
of states that the greatest wrongs inflicted upon a people
are caused by unjust and arbitrary legislation,
or by the unrelenting decrees of despotic rulers,
and that the timely revocation of injurious
and oppressive measures is the greatest good
that can be conferred upon a nation.
The legislator or ruler who has the wisdom
and magnanimity to retrace his steps
when convinced of error will sooner or later be rewarded
with the respect and gratitude
of an intelligent and patriotic people.
Our own history, although embracing a period
less than a century, affords abundant proof that
most, if not all, of our domestic troubles
are directly traceable to violations
of the organic law and excessive legislation.
The most striking illustrations of this fact are furnished
by the enactments of the past three years
upon the question of reconstruction.
After a fair trial they have substantially failed
and proved pernicious in their results,
and there seems to be no good reason
why they should longer remain upon the statute book.
States to which the Constitution guarantees
a republican form of government have been reduced
to military dependencies in each of which
the people have been made subject
to the arbitrary will of the commanding general.
Although the Constitution requires that each State
shall be represented in Congress,
Virginia, Mississippi, and Texas are yet excluded
from the two Houses, and, contrary to
the express provisions of that instrument
were denied participation in the recent election
for a President and Vice-President of the United States.
The attempt to place the white population
under the domination of persons of color in the South
has impaired, if not destroyed, the kindly relations
that had previously existed between them:
and mutual distrust has engendered a feeling of animosity
which leading in some instances to collision and bloodshed,
has prevented that cooperation between the two races
so essential to the success of industrial enterprise
in the Southern States.
Nor have the inhabitants of those States alone suffered
from the disturbed condition of affairs
growing out of these Congressional enactments.
The entire Union has been agitated
by grave apprehensions of troubles which might again
involve the peace of the nation;
its interests have been injuriously affected
by the derangement of business and labor,
and the consequent want of prosperity
throughout that portion of the country….
Congress has already been made familiar with my views
respecting the “tenure-of-office bill.”
Experience has proved that its repeal
is demanded by the best interests of the country,
and that while it remains in force the President
can not enjoin that rigid accountability of public officers
so essential to an honest and efficient execution of the laws.
Its revocation would enable the executive department
to exercise the power of appointment and removal
in accordance with the original design
of the Federal Constitution. 16
Johnson concluded,
I renew the recommendation contained
in my communication to Congress dated the 18th July last—
a copy of which accompanies this message
that the judgment of the people should be taken
on the propriety of so amending the Federal Constitution
that it shall provide—
First. For an election of President and Vice-President
by a direct vote of the people,
instead of through the agency of electors,
and making them ineligible for reelection to a second term.
Second. For a distinct designation of the person
who shall discharge the duties of President in the event of
a vacancy in that office by the death, resignation,
or removal of both the President and Vice-President.
Third. For the election of Senators of the United States
directly by the people of the several States,
instead of by the legislatures; and
Fourth. For the limitation to a period of years
of the terms of Federal judges….
Let us earnestly hope that … an all-wise Providence
will so guide our counsels as to strengthen and preserve
the Federal Unions, inspire reverence for the Constitution,
restore prosperity and happiness to our whole people,
and promote “on earth peace, good will toward men.”17
The House of Representatives allowed the entire message to be read,
and some members tried and failed to block its official printing.
In this message Johnson also advised restricting governmental spending
which he accused of favoring the wealthy over the common man.
He repeated his prophetic calls for the direct election by the people of the President
and Vice President instead of by the electoral college and of U. S. Senators
instead of by the state legislatures,
and for a limit on the terms of federal judges including the Supreme Court.
Also in 1868 in January the fish merchant William Davis in Detroit
got a patent for a refrigerated railroad car.
Young George Westinghouse invented better air brakes for locomotives,
and he would make it automatic with a steam-driven air pump in 1872.
Cooper Hewitt owned New Jersey Steel,
and he built the first open-hearth steel furnace at Trenton.
On March 3 P. T. Barnum’s New Museum on Broadway burned down.
Fire had also destroyed his first Museum on 13 July 1865.
Since 1841 about 40 million customers had paid to see his shows.
Georgia in May leased 100 black prisoners to the
Alabama and Georgia Railroad for $2,500.
Later in the year Georgia sold 134 convicts to the Selma, Rome and Dalton Railroad
and 109 other prisoners to work on constructing tracks from Macon to Brunswick.
Mississippi sent 241 convicts to Edmund Richardson
who owned the largest cotton plantation in the state, and three years later
they were transferred to the Ku Klux Klan founder Nathan Bedford Forrest.
On May 30 the Memorial holiday to remember the Civil War dead
was celebrated for the first time as “Decoration Day.”
On June 23 and July 14 Christopher Sholes, Carlos Glidden, and Samuel Soule
of Milwaukee were granted patents for a typewriter,
and Sholes developed the QWERTY keyboard by 1873.
To test the typewriter they used the sentence
“Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party,”
and Grant would use this as a slogan in his 1868 campaign for President.
On July 28 the U. S. minister Anson Burlingame, representing China,
and Secretary of State Seward revised the Tianjin Treaty by removing any restrictions
on Chinese immigration into the United States
and by granting the most-favored nation trading status.
On October 21 San Francisco was devastated
by an earthquake that caused damage estimated at $3 million.
On Friday December 25 Victoria Woodhull advised Cornelius Vanderbilt
that the spirits predicted his Central Pacific Railroad stock would go up,
and he declared an 80% dividend.
On that day it had opened at $134 per share,
and by the following Monday it was up to $165.
In gratitude he gave Victoria and her sister Tennessee Claflin
a share of his business profits.
Vanderbilt and Daniel Drew had made money in the steamboat trade,
and Vanderbilt let Drew continue as treasurer for the Erie Railroad.
Drew used his position to secretly manipulate the stock and make money
by getting the price raised and then selling short his secret shares.
Jay Gould in October told Vanderbilt that men were conspiring to take over
the Erie Railroad and to remove Drew from the board.
Gould promised to pay a penalty if Drew was reelected.
On October 8 Drew was not reelected, and he was made a director.
On December 11 Vanderbilt became the president of the New York Central Railroad.
He turned against Drew, on 15 February 1868 he had his agent Frank Work sue Drew
and the Erie directors, forcing Drew to return 58,000 shares and resign.
Vanderbilt began buying Erie Railroad stock, and he got a New York court to issue
an arrest warrant for the Erie board of directors.
Gould, Jim Fisk, and Drew fled to Jersey City.
Gould was arrested briefly and used his money to gain his freedom,
and he and Fisk bribed legislators in Albany, New York.
By summer they had spent $600,000.
Vanderbilt got cash and stock buybacks worth some $9 million,
depleting Erie’s treasury.
Gould, Fisk, and Vanderbilt were offering bribes of over $15,000 for each vote.
Erie directors Vanderbilt and Bostonians resigned,
and fall elections chose a Gould board that even included Boss Tweed.
Gould and Fisk agreed to pay Vanderbilt an undisclosed amount,
and the lawsuits against them were dropped.
Vanderbilt sold his Erie shares to Drew for $500,000 and to Erie for $3.5 million,
and R. G. Dun & Co. estimated Vanderbilt’s worth at $50 million in May.
Drew resigned in July, and Vanderbilt bought Hartford and Erie bonds for $1.25 million.
Wheat prices during the Civil War got as high as $4 a bushel
and in the post-war period were as much as $1.50, and in 1868 they fell to 67 cents.
California with flinty wheat exported flour east to the Rocky Mountains and
could also ship it to China, Japan, Britain, and Europe.
William Davis got a patent on a refrigerated railway car with tanks for ice on the sides
and sold it to a Detroit meat packer.
Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Minnesota,
and Nevada allowed Negroes to vote, but Missouri and Michigan defeated black suffrage.
Gynecological surgeons in the U. S. began doing clitoridectomies to suppress
the sexual desire of women.
New York City had an estimated 20,000 prostitutes.
The police commissioners knew of at least 600 brothels and thousands more
who made illicit dates.
During the Civil War women who followed the army of General Joe Hooker
were called “hookers.”
Many women from the South came to New York City
as conditions in the South deteriorated.
The entire nation had about 250,000 prostitutes
who were paid by ten times that many men.
The New York World’s Almanac began publishing what they considere
to be useful information.
The Atlantic Constitution became a morning daily newspaper.
Elizabeth Keckley published her autobiographical Behind the Scenes.
Or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House
when she served first lady Mary Todd Lincoln.
The popular lecturer Anna Dickinson published her novel What Answer?
about interracial marriage.
Lydia Maria Child wrote “An Appeal for the Indians” that influenced
the abolitionist Wendell Phillips and President Grant’s peace policy.
In early February 1868 the New York Republican Convention endorsed
Ulysses S. Grant for president.
On March 11 Samuel J. Tilden speaking as the leader of the Democratic Party
in New York said,
A complete and harmonious restoration
of the revolted states would have been effected
if the Republican Party had not proved to be
totally incapable of acting in the case
with any large, wise, or firm statesmanship….
All that was necessary
to heal the bleeding wounds of the country
and to allow its languishing industries to revive,
was that the Republican Party—
which boasts its great moral ideas and its philanthropy—
should rise to the moral elevation of an ordinary pugilist,
and cease to strike its adversary after it was down.18
He claimed that 3 million Negroes electing 20 senators and 50 representatives
would have twice as much power in the U. S. Senate as 13.5 million whites
in New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois who had only 10 senators.
The Republicans returned to using their original name for the 1868 party convention
at Crosby’s Opera House in Chicago where 8,000 people gathered on May 20 and 21.
Senator Benjamin Wade withdrew before the convention started as did
Chief Justice Salmon Chase who decided to run for the Democratic nomination.
Carl Schurz gave the keynote address.
The 650 delegates at the convention unanimously nominated
Ulysses S. Grant on the first ballot.
The contenders for Vice President on the first four ballots were Senator Benjamin Wade,
House Speaker Schuyler Colfax of Indiana, New York Governor Reuben E. Fenton,
and Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts.
Schurz advised delegates,
If Ben Wade is put behind General Grant,
there is not a Life Insurance Company in the world,
that will not at once want to take a premium
on the life of General Grant.19
On the 5th ballot Colfax pulled ahead of Wade 226-207, and then most delegates
shifted their votes to him giving him 541 and the VP nomination.
Grant accepted the nomination by telegram,
concluding his message with “Let us have peace.”
The Republican Party platform advocated black voting for public safety
as well as justice.
Governor Benjamin Humphreys of Mississippi had been elected in October 1865.
He was re-elected in 1868 when Democrats also elected four of the five Congressmen;
the military commander removed Humphreys on June 15,
and the U. S. Congress would not seat any of the five.
The Democratic National Convention was held at Tammany Hall in New York City
from July 4 to July 9.
The recent Governor of New York, Horatio Seymour presided.
The Democrats had 17 candidates named on ballots with 12 that got more than 10 votes.
On the first ballot George H. Pendleton of Ohio led with 105 votes, and President Andrew
Johnson got 65 followed by General Winfield Scott Hancock of Pennsylvania with 33.5.
Pendleton’s lead began fading after the 15th ballot,
and Johnson never got more than 10 votes after the 7th ballot.
On the 21st ballot Hancock got 135.5 votes,
and Senator Thomas A. Hendricks of Indiana had 132.
On the next ballot General McCook proposed Horatio Seymour, who got his first votes (22),
and then all 317 delegates shifted their votes to nominate him for President.
Seymour had declined to run, and he accepted the nomination.
The Democrats nominated Rep. Francis Preston Blair, Jr. of Missouri for Vice President.
Blair opposed black suffrage and made speeches calling for the restoration of white people
to replace the new governments in the South
that were led by “a semi-barbarous race of blacks.”
The Democrats’ platform declared the four Reconstruction Act
“unconstitutional, revolutionary, and void,” and they proposed
“the abolition of the Freedman’s Bureau and all political instrumentalities
designed to secure negro supremacy.”20
Republicans would accuse Seymour of having opposed the last war
and Blair of wanting to start a new one.
New York’s Democratic Party chairman Samuel Tilden
and Cyrus McCormick gave $10,000 each.
Northern capitalists were united and supported Republican candidates with funds,
and the powerful Tammany lawyer Edwards Pierrepont donated $20,000
to Grant’s campaign and made speeches for him.
Grant let the former Brigadier General John Rawlins manage his campaign
from Washington while the candidate spent most of his time home at Galena, Illinois
except when he visited the 280 acres near St. Louis that his wife Julia Dent had inherited.
With General Sherman he traveled west to Kansas and Denver where he excoriated
the “three epidemics” of the West—pistols, bowie knives, and whiskey.
Republican politicians wrote letters and gave speeches for their candidate,
and James H. Wilson and Charles A. Dana
published campaign biographies that praised Grant.
Northern businessmen financed the campaign
with large donations from Jay Cooke and others.
The House Committee on Elections reported that in the election
1,081 blacks and white Unionists had been killed in Louisiana, and as many were wounded.
Also killed were over 600 in Kentucky and dozens in South Carolina.
The Freedman’s Bureau found that 31 were murdered in Georgia
between August and November.
The Ku Klux Klan declared they had assassinated Republican politicians in
Alabama, Georgia, Texas, and South Carolina.
A former Texas governor in May estimated that 250 Union men had been killed
in the last six months.
Whites and blacks formed militias in Brazos County,
and 25 freedmen lost their lives in one battle as many blacks and Unionists fled.
The Ku Klux Klan attacked black and white Republicans, and Nathan Bedford Forrest
claimed that the KKK had a half million men in the South.
That summer newly elected legislatures in Louisiana, Alabama, and Tennessee
asked for additional federal troops to quell the violence;
Secretary of War Schofield refused to send any without an order from President Johnson.
The U. S. Attorney General Evarts told the commanders that the civil authorities
were to maintain order instead of federal forces.
Democrats and moderate Republicans in the Georgia legislature
expelled the 33 newly elected black members in September.
Philip Joiner had been expelled, and he led a march
of mostly blacks to the white town of Camilla.
The sheriff and a committee of “citizens” warned the black and white activists
they would face violence and must turn in their guns.
The marchers refused, and on September 19
about 400 whites murdered a dozen blacks and wounded about forty.
Louisiana’s former Governor Michael Hahn (1864-65) had been elected
to the U. S. Senate in 1865, and the Republicans had not let him take his seat.
In 1867 he began editing the New Orleans Republican.
In October 1868 he reported,
“Murder and intimidation are the order of the day in this state.”21
In New Orleans whites broke up Republican meetings,
and a mob destroyed a Republican newspaper, forcing the editor Emerson Bentley to flee.
Then they attacked plantations and killed about 200 blacks.
General Lovell Rousseau was a friend of President Johnson,
and he took no action, advising blacks to avoid the polls for their own protection,
concluding that the “ascendance of the negro in this state is approaching its end.”22
These massacres led Louisiana and Georgia Republicans
to stop campaigning during the elections, and in eleven Georgia counties,
where blacks were the majority, no votes were recorded for the Republican candidates.
In October the Republicans won elections in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana.
In the November election the Democratic candidate Seymour won in New York,
New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Oregon as well as
in Louisiana and Georgia for a total of 80 electoral votes.
The states of Virginia, Mississippi, and Texas had not been restored to the Union
and could not vote.
The Republican Grant won 214 electoral votes in the other 26 states
and got 52.7% of the people’s votes to Seymour’s 47.3%.
Voters in Iowa and Minnesota passed constitutional amendments
giving blacks the right to vote.
Democrats gained 20 seats in the U. S. House of Representatives.
Republicans increased their majority in the U. S. Senate to 57-9,
and Senator Wade was defeated by the Democrat Allen Thurman
who had been Chief Justice of the Ohio Supreme Court for one term 1854-56.
Voters in Michigan and Pennsylvania voted down referenda on giving blacks the vote.
In the reconstructed states by 1868 about 703,000 black men and 627,000 white men
had registered to vote.
On November 3 in New Jersey 172 women voted
although their ballots were “courteously refused” by the male electors.
Grant returned to Washington on November 7.
He had no experience in a civic office and thought he could run the government
as he had his army staff; he later realized that was an error which caused mistakes.
President-elect Grant refused to ride in the same carriage with Johnson
to the inauguration, and Johnson declined to attend.
Instead while Grant was being inaugurated on 4 March 1869,
Johnson sent out by telegraph his “Farewell Address to the People of the United States”
in which he accused members of Congress of having
boldly betrayed their trust,
broken their oaths of obedience to the Constitution,
and undermined the very foundations
of liberty, justice and good government.
The address was printed in the New York Times and other newspapers.
In January 1875 Democrats in the Tennessee legislature elected Andrew Johnson
to the U. S. Senate, and he served from March 4 for almost five months
until his death after a stroke on July 31.
Notes
1. Congressional Globe, 39th Congress 2d session, p. 320.
2. Impeached: The Trial of President Andrew Johnson by David O. Stewart, p. 81.
3. 39th Congress, 2 Session, House Report No. 23, p. 30 in The Annals of America,
Volume 10, p. 88.
4. The Man Who Saved the Union: Ulysses Grant in War and Peace
by H. W. Brands, p. 401.
5. 40th Congress, 2 Session, House Executive Document No. 1 in
The Annals of America, Vol. 10, p. 103.
6. The Annals of America, Vol. 10, p. 111.
7. Messages and Papers of the Presidents 1789-1908
ed. James D. Richardson, Vol. 6, p. 565.
8. Ibid., p. 566.
9. Reconstruction: Voices from America’s First Great Struggle for Racial Equality
ed. Brooks D. Simpson, p. 315.
10. New York Times, July 17, 1870 in Great Documents in American Indian History
ed. Wayne Moquin, p. 211-213.
11. The Man Who Saved the Union: Ulysses Grant in War and Peace
by H. W. Brands, p. 413.
12. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown, p. 144.
13. Grant by Jean Edward Smith, p. 519.
14. Impeached: The Trial of President Andrew Johnson by David O. Stewart, p. 158.
15. Ibid., p. 192.
16. Messages and Papers of the Presidents, Vol. 6, p. 672-673.
17. Ibid., p. 691.
18. The Annals of America, Vol. 10, p. 122.
19. Official Proceedings of the National Republican Conventions,
p. 64 in The Presidency of Ulysses S. Grant by Charles W. Calhoun, p. 41.
20. Official Proceedings of the National Democratic Convention,
p. 170 in The Presidency of Ulysses S. Grant by Charles W. Calhoun, p. 46.
21. Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution 1863-1877 by Eric Foner, p. 342.
22. Ibid.
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