The Leadership of Andrew Johnson
Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction.
by Eric L. McKitrick.
The University of Chicago Press. 560 pp. $8.50.
Its blind spots notwithstanding, Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction heralds the appearance of a major new historian. It marks, as well, a renewed interest among the younger historians in political history—or, more accurately, in a brand of political history which deals with such neglected questions as: Do politicians say what they mean—or mean what they say? How does the legislative process work? How does the machinery of politics function? In short, Mr. McKitrick seeks to analyze the nature of political appeals, the complex interaction between leaders and led, and the content of legislative debates.
The most familiar story of Reconstruction is based largely upon the work done by James Ford Rhodes, William A. Dunning, Walter L. Fleming, and John W. Burgess at the turn of the century when racism in the United States was at its peak. This version pictures the “Vindictives” and “Radicals” in Congress—the Sumners, Stevenses, Wades, and Butlers—fastening upon the prostrate South the corrupt rule of Carpetbaggers, Scalawags, and ignorant Negroes; such rule is followed by the long, and finally victorious, struggle by the Southerners to restore white supremacy and redeem their states from bankruptcy. The victim of the story is Johnson, true heir of Father Abraham, whose policy of magnanimity toward the South was overborne by a hostile Congress.
In 1927, however, Charles and Mary Beard, in The Rise of American Civilization, suggested that the Radicals had been more interested in safeguarding the protective tariff, the national banks, and sound money than in punishing the South or upholding Negro rights. Three years later, Howard K. Beale, in The Critical Year, went on to argue that the Radicals had spoken for the Northeastern business interests which dominated the Republican party. Again the victim of the story had been Johnson, the steadfast foe of bond-holders, monopolists, and tariff-profiteers—a champion of democracy, a latter-day Jacksonian, a Populist before his time. Such an interpretation suited the hostile atmosphere of the 30’s toward business and the GOP, and, until recently, historians writing on Reconstruction have generally accepted it.
But several important questions remain unanswered, indeed unasked, by both these interpretations. Since strong presidents in the United States often have had a decisive effect on events, and even weak presidents normally exert powerful influence, why not Johnson? What were the causes which reduced the executive power to such impotence during Johnson’s administration? Taking such questions as his starting point, Mr. McKitrick thus focuses on the chief executive. And the Andrew Johnson who emerges is no longer the martyred statesman, but a stubborn, small-minded, vindictive man whose political folly and bad judgment were clearly responsible for much of the disaster that befell the South. The tragedy of the Reconstruction, Mr. McKitrick declares, was Johnson’s failure in leadership.
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Drawing upon the findings of modern psychology, Mr. McKitrick brilliantly depicts the conflicting emotions within the United States after the Civil War. In the North, joy and relief were coupled with a spirit of magnanimity toward the defeated as well as with a demand for safeguards to preserve the gains of victory; in the South, fear, bitterness, and hatred were balanced by a spirit of acquiescence. The task of the new president was twofold: to work with the Republican majority in Congress in framing a program of reconstruction which would reassure the North, and to prod Southerners into the show of repentance the victors demanded. Extremists in the Republican party were a minority during the summer and fall of 1865, and a minority without any set program on either Negro suffrage, exclusion of the Southern states, or opposition to Johnson. Most Republicans, both in Congress and throughout the country, were middle-of-the-roaders, opposed, in general, to excess, and ready to support the new president as firmly as they had supported his predecessor. The story of the next three years, according to Mr. McKitrick, is how Johnson, in his blindness to political realities and Northern sensibilities, drove these supporters into the opposition.
The difficulty, Mr. McKitrick believes, lay in the fact that Johnson was “a lone wolf,” an “outsider,” for whom politics was a matter of principles. Applying his principles—equal rights, local self-rule, states’ rights but not secession, and strict construction—to the problem of reconstruction, Johnson concluded that the Southern states had never left the Union and so retained all their rights. The officers of the Southern states had been rebellious and treasonable but when new officers with proven loyalty (or those duly pardoned by himself) were installed, then the states would be fully restored.
But this program did not provide the reassurance demanded by the North. At the same time, it led the Southerners into believing that Johnson, not the Congress, would have the final say on Reconstruction. Johnson also failed—worse, refused—to make clear to the South how it could salve Northern sensibilities. Left without guidance, Southerners blundered into mistake after mistake. And when Johnson vetoed the Republican-sponsored Freedmen’s Bureau and Civil Rights bills, he doomed any chance of working with the Republican leadership.
Still, even after the sweeping Republican triumph in 1866, the bulk of Northern opinion was disposed to accept ratification of the 14th Amendment as the basis for the South’s readmission to the Union. Whether the South would accept the amendment depended largely upon what Johnson did. But Johnson, shunning this final chance, called upon the South to reject it. In so doing, Mr. McKitrick concludes, he played into the hands of the extremists and paved the way for military rule over the South. Even after Johnson was stripped of all influence, he continued to antagonize Northern sensibilities by repeated and spiteful provocations, until the Republican leaders in a fit of “abandoned wrath” struck to impeach him.
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Just as the accounts of Rhodes, Dunning, Fleming, and Burgess mirrored the high tide of racism at the turn of the century, just as Beale’s The Critical Year appealed to a generation disillusioned with business, so Mr. McKitrick’s theme—the failure of presidential leadership—reflects preoccupations of our own time. Yet Mr. McKitrick’s specific conclusion, that Johnson failed to display the requisite leadership, is not entirely persuasive. Is it true that Johnson simply misunderstood the drift of Northern sentiment and thus failed to tell the South what it must do to appease that sentiment? Was the difference between Lincoln and Johnson simply that the former had been a shrewder politician? Or may not the crucial distinction have been that on the whole Lincoln sympathized with Northern aspirations, whereas Johnson did not?
Perhaps Johnson saw—and saw too clearly for his own comfort—that the Republican program for “reconstruction” went beyond the renunciation of secession, beyond even the abolition of slavery, and demanded a revolution in Southern attitudes on the race question. That he approved is doubtful. Johnson regarded himself as the champion of the poorer whites of the South—the group, then as now, most hostile to Negro political and social equality. Certainly he erred in over-estimating the support for his stand in the North. But would a man of his convictions have swallowed them and urged the South to yield, whatever support was his? (And even if he had done so, would the South have yielded short of bayonet point? Events since that day would question an affirmative answer.)
This objection does not detract from Mr. McKitrick’s achievement. His analysis does not for the most part tap new sources, but he has read the familiar ones with a very fresh eye. To some degree, his approach is simply the result of a changed intellectual climate. Free of the racial prejudice which blinded their predecessors both at the turn of the century and later, present-day historians no longer dismiss Reconstruction as a Frankenstein spawned by malicious partisans. Nowdays the stress is upon the limits of the Radical program, the refusal of the Republican leadership to revolutionize the South, and the unwillingness of the North to support more drastic action. Nor does business seem the bogey it appeared in the 30’s. If all historians have not accepted the transformation of the robber barons into industrial statesmen, most recognize the stresses and strains imposed upon any society by rapid industrialization, and concede that whatever the faults of the robber barons, the United States suffered less from industrialization than did England, and far less than Russia and the present underdeveloped countries.
Mr. McKitrick’s approach also reflects the use of techniques borrowed from the newer social sciences. Whereas the writers of the 30’s treated self-interest as sufficient explanation for behavior, Mr. McKitrick eschews this brand of simple determinism. From modern psychology, he has learned the importance of hidden fears and anxieties, and of half-conscious hopes and desires, in shaping men’s actions; and from the political scientists who probe the interplay of ideals and self-interest behind political behavior, he has learned that the business community is not the monolith so many writers assumed it to be. But unlike many champions of the usefulness of social science techniques for understanding history, Mr. McKitrick has nevertheless based his work upon solid research; he has not written poor sociology or worse psychology, and his book stands as a model for the use of social science techniques to illuminate, not distort, the past.
Yet perhaps what most fundamentally distinguishes Mr. McKitrick from his predecessors is his attitude toward the historical process; the differences might be summed up as the difference between the “inevitablist” and the “possibilist.” Previous writers on Reconstruction have regarded the period as a tragic era. Historians at the turn of the century depicted the triumph of partisan malevolence; those of the 30’s recorded the onward sweep of the almighty dollar. Impending disaster hangs over their accounts, and each chapter marks only another step toward the inevitable denouement. But Mr. McKitrick is a possibilist. At nearly every stage of Reconstruction, he insists, there existed the possibility of a more generous settlement than the one which resulted. That he feels these chances were lost through Johnson’s failures is another matter—they existed, and because Mr. McKitrick sees events in this way, his book treats seriously the alternatives confronting the political leaders of that day.
Historians have too frequently dismissed what politicians say as sheer balderdash. But politics in a democracy is not just a game of bluff and bluster; what politicians say must appeal to the man in the street—and the task of the historian is to analyze the nature of that appeal. Similarly, too many historians blur over legislative proposals and so fail to illuminate the differences underlying political debate. What are the specific details of a proposed bill? the arguments pro and con? the amendments presented? adopted? rejected? Unless the historian answers such questions, political debate must appear meaningless. And lastly, the historian must grasp the subtle play in the world of politics between ideals and self-interest, between leaders and led, and between national issues and local politics.
More than any previous writer on Reconstruction, Mr. McKitrick has considered such problems. Illuminating with masterful skill the divisive issues of those years, he has captured the mingled idealism and selfishness, nobility and demagoguery, behind Andrew Johnson’s downfall. His brilliant stage-by-stage analysis of the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, for instance, sheds more light upon the intent of its framers than all the weighty commentaries of lawyers and judges. Most importantly, Mr. McKitrick realizes that when men spoke of preserving the fruits of victory, they meant more than safeguarding the national banks; he grasps that when men spoke of safeguarding Negro rights, they meant more than defending the tariff. Reconstruction—the future of the South and the Negro in the South—was the overriding issue before the country, and the Republican demands for guarantees did represent the deeply felt convictions of millions of common men in the North. Mr. McKitrick understands this truth—and that is why his book is the most stimulating and provocative work on the Reconstruction in the last thirty years.
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