A History of the American People

been sacrificed; we must extinguish our resentments if we expect harmony and union. There is
too much disposition, in certain quarters, to hector and dictate to the people of the South, to
refuse to recognise them as fellow-citizens. Such persons have too little respect for Southerners'
rights. I do not share feelings of that kind.'
However, Lincoln was dead, and the task of reconstruction fell on his successor, Andrew
Johnson. Johnson agreed wholly with Lincoln's view that the South, consistent with the rights of
the freed slaves, should be treated with leniency. But he was in a much less strong position to
enforce such views. He had not been twice elected on a Northern Republican platform, fought
and won a Civil War against the rebels, and held the nation together during five terrifying years.
Moreover, he was a Southerner-and, until 1861, a lifelong Democrat. The fact that he had defied
the whole might of the Southern establishment in 1861 by being the only Southern senator to
remain in Washington when the South seceded was too easily brushed aside. So, too, was his
profound belief in democracy. Johnson stood for the underdog. He had nothing in common with
the old planter aristocracy who had willed the war and led the South to destruction. In many
respects he was a forerunner of the Southern populists who were soon to make their entry on to
the American scene.
He was born in Raleigh, North Carolina. His background was modest, not to say poor. He
seems to have been entirely self-educated. At thirteen he was apprenticed to a tailor but ran away
from his cruel master and came to Greeneville, Tennessee, where he plied his trade and
eventually became its mayor. He was a typical Jacksonian Democrat, strongly in favor of cheap
land for the poor-his passionate belief in the Homestead Act was a major factor in his breach
with the Southern leadership in 1860-1. He was state representative and senator and governor,
representative and senator in Congress, and finally (in Lincoln's first term) military governor of
Tennessee from 1862. He was a brilliant speaker, but crude in some ways, with a vile temper.
And he drank. At Lincoln's Second Inaugural, following his own swearing-in, Johnson, who had
been consuming whiskey, insisted on making a long, rambling speech, boasting of his plebeian
origins and reminding the assembled dignitaries from the Supreme Court and the diplomatic
corps, with all your fine feathers and gewgaws,' that they were butcreatures of the people.'
Lincoln was disgusted and told the parade marshal, Do not let Johnson sneak outside.’ Johnson began his term with a violent denunciation of all rebels astraitors' who `ought to be hanged.'
Then he proceeded to change tack and carry out what he believed were Lincoln's wishes and
policies. There were three possible constitutional positions to be taken up about the South. The
extreme position, urged on the White House and Congress by Senator Charles Sumner, the
firebrand who had been caned in the Senate, and by Thaddeus Stevens (1792-1868), chairman of
the House Ways and Means Committee, was that secession had, in effect, destroyed the Southern
states, which now had no constitutional existence, and it was entirely in the power of Congress to
decide when and how they were to be reconstituted. Both men were, first and foremost, good
haters, and they hated the South and wanted to punish it to the maximum of their power. And
their power, in both Houses of Congress, was enormous. Second, there was the bulk of the
Republican majority who took a somewhat more moderate position: the rebellion had not
destroyed the Southern states but it had caused them to forfeit their constitutional rights, and it
was up to Congress to determine when those rights should be restored, under the article of the
Constitution guaranteeing all states a republican form of government. Finally there was the
Lincoln-Johnson clemency position: this held that rebellion had not affected the states at all,
beyond incapacitating those taking part in it from performing their constitutional duties, and that