Part 12 (1/2)

I knew S. S. c.o.x (”Sunset” c.o.x, as he was called), as a member of the Forty-first Congress. He had served in some previous Congress as a member from Ohio; but when I knew him he was serving as a member from New York.

c.o.x was an able man, as a speaker, a writer, and a diplomat. He was always listened to with great respect and attention when he addressed the House, but a considerable amount of fun was poked at him after a certain occasion when he had interrupted General Butler a time or two in debate, and the General, finally losing patience, replied to one of his questions with the admonition: ”Shoo, fly, don't bodder me!” I was present at the time; the galleries were filled, as they always were in those days; and when General Butler uttered this reproof the whole House, galleries, and floor, was in an uproar, maintaining the confusion for some minutes. When it seemed like subsiding, it would break out again and again, and so it continued for quite a while. When order was finally restored c.o.x undertook to reply; but he could not do so. He had been so crippled by the response of the audience to Butler's remark that he never recovered from it.

c.o.x was a splendid man. He always thought in those days that he had not been quite appreciated by his friends in the Democratic party, and they thought the same way; but he was so good-humored, and such a whole-souled man and so fond of wit that he really never did get what he was ent.i.tled to.

I was trying to pa.s.s a bill which I had prepared for the purpose of prohibiting and wiping out polygamy in Utah. I had reported the bill from the Committee on Territories, and I was doing my best to pa.s.s it. For some reason or other (afterwards I learned it was an ulterior reason to help out a friend), General Schenck undertook to defeat the measure, and for this purpose he asked to have it referred to the Committee on Judiciary. This committee probably had jurisdiction over the subject; I did not think so at the time, and believed that such a reference would kill the bill. He seemed to be making some headway with the Republicans, when c.o.x came over to me from the Democratic side of the House, and proposed that if I would yield to him for five minutes he would help me to pa.s.s the bill. I told him to go back to his seat and that I would yield to him directly. When I did c.o.x took the floor, and to my utter astonishment he denounced the bill as the most outrageous bill that had ever been brought before the House, declaring in the most spirited manner that of course it ought to be referred to the Judiciary Committee, because every one knew that such a reference would kill it.

But he was shrewder than I apprehended at the moment. His talk had the desired effect, for the Republicans who had been following Schneck determined that they would not be responsible for killing the bill; they came back to me, and the measure was pa.s.sed through the House by a substantial majority.

CHAPTER IX THE IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 1865

As I look back now over the vista of years that have come and gone, it seems to me that I entered the Lower House of Congress just at the beginning of the most important period in all our history.

The great President had been a.s.sa.s.sinated; the war was over; Andrew Johnson, a Union Democrat, was President of the United States.

Reconstruction was the problem which confronted us, how to heal up the Nation's wounds and remake a Union which would endure for all time to come. These were the difficult conditions that had to be dealt with by the Thirty-ninth Congress.

Andrew Johnson was the queerest character that ever occupied the White House, and, with the exception of Lincoln only, he entered it under the most trying and difficult circ.u.mstances in all our history; but Lincoln had, what Johnson lacked, the support and confidence of the great Republican party. Johnson was never a Republican, and never pretended to be one. He was a lifelong Democrat, and a slave-holder as well; but he was loyal to the Union, no man living more so. As a Senator from Tennessee, alone of all the Southern Senators he faced his colleagues from the South in denouncing secession as treason. His subsequent phenomenal course in armed opposition to the rebellion brought about his nomination for the Vice-Presidency as a shrewd stroke to secure the support of the War Democrats of the North and the Union men of his State and section.

He came to the Presidency under the cloud of President Lincoln's a.s.sa.s.sination, when the majority of the North believed that a Southern conspiracy had laid the great President low. The seceding States hated him as a traitor to his own section; the North distrusted him as a Democrat. At first I believe the very radical element of the Republican party in Congress, led by old Ben Wade of Ohio, than whom there was no more unsafe man in either house of Congress, were disposed, if not openly to rejoice, which they dared not do, to see with some secret satisfaction the entrance of Johnson into the White House. It is well known that Wade did say in his first interview with President Johnson, when, as a member of the committee on the conduct of the war, he waited on him, ”Johnson, we have faith in you. By the G.o.ds, there will be no more trouble in running the Government.”

I have already, in another chapter, described the scene which took place in the Senate chamber when Johnson was inducted into office as Vice-President; the exhibition he made of himself at the time of taking the oath of office, in the presence of the President of the United States and the representatives of the Governments of the world. All this, advertised at the time in the opposition press, added to the prejudice against Johnson in the North and made his position more trying and difficult.

There were two striking points in Johnson's character, and I knew him well: First, his loyalty to the Union; and, second, his utter fearlessness of character. He could not be cowed; old Ben Wade, Sumner, Stevens, all the great leaders of that day could not, through fear, influence him one particle.

In 1861, when he was being made the target of all sorts of threats on account of his solitary stand against secession in the Senate, he let fall this characteristic utterance:

”I want to say, not boastingly, with no anger in my bosom, that these two eyes of mine have never looked upon anything in the shape of mortal man that this heart has feared.”

This utterance probably ill.u.s.trates Johnson's character more clearly than anything that I could say. He sought rather than avoided a fight. Headstrong, domineering, having fought his way in a State filled with aristocratic Southerners, from the cla.s.s of so-called ”low whites” to the highest position in the United States, he did not readily yield to the dictates of the dominating forces in Congress.

Lincoln had a well-defined policy of reconstruction. Indeed, so liberal was he disposed to be in his treatment of the Southern States, that immediately after the surrender of Richmond he would have recognized the old State Government of Virginia had it not been for the peremptory veto of Stanton. Congress was not in session when Johnson came to the Presidency in April, 1865. To do him no more than simple justice, I firmly believe that he wanted to follow out, in reconstruction, what he thought was the policy of Mr. Lincoln, and in this he was guided largely by the advice of Mr. Seward.

But there was this difference. Johnson was, probably in good faith, pursuing the Lincoln policy of reconstruction; but when the Legislatures and Executives of the Southern States began openly pa.s.sing laws and executing them so that the negro was substantially placed back into slavery, practically nullifying the results of the awful struggle, the untold loss of life and treasure, Mr.

Lincoln certainly would have receded and would have dealt with the South with an iron hand, as Congress had determined to do, and as General Grant was compelled to do when he a.s.sumed the Presidency.

From April to the rea.s.sembling of Congress in December, Johnson had a free hand in dealing with the seceded States, and he was not slow to take advantage of it. He seemed disposed to recognize the old State Governments; to restrict the suffrage to the whites; to exercise freely the pardoning power in the way of extending executive clemency not only to almost all cla.s.ses, but to every individual who would apply for it. The result was, it seemed to be certain that if the Johnson policy were carried out to the fullest extent, the supremacy of the Republican party in the councils of the Nation would be at stake.

To express it in a word, the motive of the opposition to the Johnson plan of reconstruction was the firm conviction that its success would wreck the Republican party, and by restoring the Democrats to power bring back Southern supremacy and Northern va.s.salage.

The impeachment, in a word, was the culmination of the struggle between the legislative and the executive departments of the Government over the problem of reconstruction. The legislative department claimed exclusive jurisdiction over reconstruction; the executive claimed that it alone was competent to deal with the subject.

This is a very brief summary of the conditions which confronted us when I entered the Thirty-ninth Congress. Representatives of the eleven seceding States were there to claim their seats in Congress.

The Republican members met in caucus the Sat.u.r.day evening preceding the meeting of Congress on Monday. I, as a member-elect, was present, and I remember how old Thaddeus Stevens at once a.s.sumed the dominating control in opposition to the President's plan.

Stevens was a most remarkable character,--one of the most remarkable in the legislative history of the United States. He believed firmly in negro equality and negro suffrage. As one writer eloquently expresses it:

”According to his creed, the insurgent States were conquered provinces to be shaped into a paradise for the freedman and a h.e.l.l for the rebel. His eye shot over the blackened southern land; he saw the carnage, the desolation, the starvation, and the shame; and like a battered old warhorse, he flung up his frontlet, sniffed the tainted breeze, and snorted 'Ha, Ha!'”

It was at once determined by the Republican majority in Congress that the representatives of the eleven seceding States should not be admitted. The Const.i.tution expressly gives to the House and Senate the exclusive power to judge of the admission and qualification of its own members.

We were surprised at the moderation of the President's message, which came in on Tuesday after Congress a.s.sembled. In tone and general character the message was wholly unlike Johnson. It was an admirable state doc.u.ment, one of the finest from a literary and probably from every other standpoint that ever came from an Executive to Congress. It was thought at the time that Mr. Seward wrote it, but it has since been a.s.serted that it was the product of that foremost of American historians, J. C. Bancroft, one of Mr. Johnson's close personal friends.