TWENTY YEARS OF CONGRESS. -- CHAPTER I. ANDREW JOHNSON INSTALLED AS PRESIDENT. - CABINET AND SENATORS WITNESSES TO A -- BRAHAM LINCOLN expired at twenty-two minutes after seven o'clock on the morning of April 15, 1865. Three hours later, in the presence of all the members of the Cabinet except Mr. Seward who lay wounded and bleeding in his own home, the oath of office, as President of the United States, was administered to Andrew Johnson by Chief Justice Chase. The simple but impres VOL. II. 1 1 sive ceremony was performed in Mr. Johnson's lodgings at the Kirkwood Hotel; and besides the members of the Cabinet, who were present in their official character, those senators who had remained in Washington since the adjournment of Congress were called in as witnesses. While the death of Mr. Lincoln was still unknown to the majority of the citizens of the Republic, his successor was installed in office, and the administration of the Federal Government was radically changed. It was especially fortunate that the Vice-President was at the National Capital. He had arrived but five days before, and was intending to leave for his home in Tennessee within a few hours. His prompt investiture with the Chief Executive authority of the Nation preserved order, maintained law, and restored confidence to the people. With the defeat and disintegration of the armies of the Confederacy, and with the approaching disbandment of the armies of the Union, constant watchfulness was demanded of the National Executive. It is a striking tribute to the strength of the Constitution and of the Government that the orderly administration of affairs was not interrupted by a tragedy which in many countries might have been the signal for a bloody revolution. The new President confronted grave responsibilities. The least reflecting among those who took part in the mighty struggle perceived that the duties devolved upon the Government by victoryif less exacting and less critical than those imposed by actual war— were more delicate in their nature, and required statesmanship of a different character. The problem of reconstructing the Union, and adapting its varied interests to its changed condition, demanded the highest administrative ability. Many of the questions involved were new, and, if only for that reason, perplexing. No experience of our own had established precedents; none in other countries afforded even close analogies. Rebellions and civil wars had, it is true, been frequent, but they had been chiefly among peoples consolidated under one government, ruled in all their affairs, domestic and external, by one central power. The overthrow of armed resistance in such cases was the end of trouble, and political society and public order were rapidly re-formed under the restraint which the triumphant authority was so easily able to impose. A prompt adjustment after the manner of consolidated governments was not practicable under our Federal system. In the division of functions between the Nation and the State, those that reach and affect the citizen in his every-day life belong principally to the State. The tenure of land is guarantied and regulated by State Law; the domestic relations of husband and wife, parent and child, guardian and ward, together with the entire educational system, are left exclusively to the same authority, as is also the preservation of the public peace by proper police-systems- the National Government intervening only on the call of the State when the State's power is found inadequate to the suppression of disorder. These leading functions of the State were left in full force under the Confederate Government; and the Confederate Government being now destroyed, and the States that composed it being under the complete domination of the armies of the Union, the whole framework of society was in confusion, if not indeed in chaos. To restore the States to their normal relations to the Union, to enable them to organize governments in harmony with the fundamental changes. wrought by the war, was the embarrassing task which the Administration of President Johnson was compelled to meet on the very threshold of its existence. The successful issue of these unprecedented and complicated difficulties depended in great degree upon the character and temper of the Executive. Many wise men regarded it as a fortunate circumstance that Mr. Lincoln's successor was from the South, though a much larger number in the North found in this fact a source of disquietude. Mr. Johnson had the manifest disadvantage of not possessing any close or intimate knowledge of the people of the Loyal States. It was feared moreover, that his relations with the ruling spirits of the South in the exciting period preceding the war specially unfitted him for harmonious co-operation with them in the pending exigencies. The character and career of Mr. Johnson were anomalous and in many respects contradictory. By birth he belonged to that large. class in the South known as "poor whites," a class scarcely less despised by the slave-holding aristocracy than were the human chattels themselves. Born in North Carolina, and bred to the trade of a tailor, he reached his fifteenth year before he was taught even to read. In his eighteenth year he migrated to Tennessee, and established himself in that rich upland region on the eastern border of the State, where by altitude the same agricultural conditions are developed that characterize the land which lies several degrees farther North. Specially adapted to the cereals, the grasses, and the fruits of Southern Pennsylvania and Ohio, East Tennessee could not em ploy slave-labor with the profit which it brought in the rich cottonfields of the neighboring lowlands, and the result was that the population contained a large majority of whites. Owing much to a wise marriage, pursuing his trade with skill and industry, Johnson gained steadily in knowledge and in influence. Ambitious, quick to learn, honest, necessarily frugal, he speedily became a recognized leader of the class to which he belonged. Before he had attained his majority he was chosen to an important municipal office, and at twenty-two he was elected mayor of his town. Thenceforward his promotion was rapid. At twenty-seven he was sent to the Legislature of his State; and in 1840, when he was in his thirty-second year, he was nominated for the office of Presidential elector and canvassed the State in the interest of Mr. Van Buren. Three years later he was chosen representative in Congress where he served ten years. He was then nominated for governor, and in the elections of 1853 and 1855 defeated successively two of the most. popular Whigs in Tennessee, Gustavus A. Henry and Meredith P. Gentry. In 1857 he was promoted to the Senate of the United States, where he was serving at the outbreak of the civil war. While Mr. Johnson had been during his entire political life a member of the Democratic party, and had attained complete control in his State, the Southern leaders always distrusted him. Though allied to the interests of slavery and necessarily drawn to its defense, his instincts, his prejudices, his convictions were singularly strong on the side of the free people. His sympathies with the poor were acute and demonstrative-leading him to the advocacy of measures which' in a wide and significant sense were hostile to slavery. In the early part of his career as a representative in Congress, he warmly espoused, if indeed he did not originate, the homestead policy. In support of that policy he followed a line of argument and illustration absolutely and irreconcilably antagonistic to the interests of the slave system as those interests were understood by the mass of Southern Democratic leaders. The bestowment of our public domain in quarter-sections (a hundred and sixty acres of land) upon the actual settler, on the simple condition that he should cultivate it and improve it as his home, was a more effective blow against the spread of slavery in the Territories than any number of legal restrictions or provisos of the kind proposed by Mr. Wilmot. Slavery could not be established with success except upon the condition of large tracts of land for the master, and the exclusion of the small farmer from contact and from competition. The example of the latter's manual industry and his consequent thrift and prosperity, must ultimately prove fatal to the entire slave system. It may not have been Mr. Johnson's design to injure the institution of slavery by the advocacy of the homestead policy; but such advocacy was nevertheless hostile, and this consideration did not stay his hand or change his action. Mr. Johnson's mode of urging and defending the homestead policy was at all times offensive to the mass of his Democratic associates of the South, many of whom against their wishes were compelled to support the measure on its final passage, for fear of giving offense to their landless white constituents, and in the still more pressing fear, that if Johnson should be allowed to stand alone in upholding the measure, he would acquire a dangerous ascendency over that large element in the Southern population. Johnson spoke with ill-disguised hatred of "an inflated and heartless landed aristocracy," not applying the phrase especially to the South, but making an argument which tended to sow dissension in that section. He declared that "the withholding of the use of the soil from the actual cultivator is violative of the principles essential to human existence," and that when "the violation reaches that point where it can no longer be borne, revolution begins." His argument startlingly outlined a condition such as has long existed in Ireland, and applied it with suggestive force to the possible fate of the South. He then sketched his own ideal of a rural population, an ideal obviously based on free labor and free institutions. "You make the settler on the domain," said he, "a better citizen of the community. He becomes better qualified to discharge the duties of a freeman. He is, in fact, the representative of his own homestead, and is a man in the enlarged and proper sense of the term. He comes to the ballot-box and votes without the fear or the restraint of some landlord. After the hurry and bustle of election day are over, he mounts his own horse, returns to his own domicil, goes to his own barn, feeds his own stock. His wife turns out and milks their own cows, churns their own butter; and when the rural repast is ready, he and his wife and their children sit down at the same table together to enjoy the sweet product of their own hands, with hearts thankful to God for having cast their lots in this country where the land is made free under the protecting and fostering care of a beneficent Government." |