The American Nation A History of the United States, Combined Volume (14th Edition)

Presidential Reconstruction 405

interests, for with Lincoln perished the South’s
best hope for a mild peace. After his body had been
taken home to Illinois, the national mood hard-
ened; apparently the awesome drama was still
unfolding—retribution and a final humbling of the
South were inevitable.

Presidential Reconstruction

Despite its bloodiness, the Civil War had caused less
intersectional hatred than might have been
expected. Although civilian property was often
seized or destroyed, the invading armies treated the
southern population with forbearance, both during
the war and after Appomattox. While Confederate
President Davis was ensconced in Richmond behind
Lee’s army, Northerners boasted that they would
“hang Jeff Davis to a sour apple tree,” and when he
was captured in Georgia in May 1865 he was at
once clapped into irons preparatory to being tried
for treason and murder. But feeling against Davis
subsided quickly. In 1867 the military turned him
over to the civil courts, which released him on bail.

He was never brought to trial. (His wife, Varina

Davis, eventually became a close friend of Julia

Dent Grant, widow of Ulysses S. Grant.) A few

other Confederate officials spent short periods

behind bars, but the only Southerner executed for

war crimes was Major Henry Wirz, the comman-

dant of Andersonville military prison.

The legal questions related to bringing the

defeated states back into the Union were extremely

complex. Since Southerners believed that secession

was legal, logic should have compelled them to

argue that they were out of the Union and would

thus have to be formally readmitted. Northerners

should have taken the contrary position, for they

had fought to prove that secession was illegal.

Yet the people of both sections did just the opposite.

Senator Charles Sumner and Congressman Thaddeus

Stevens, who in 1861 had been uncompromising

expounders of the theory that the Union was indis-

soluble, now insisted that the Confederate states had

Ben Wade, leader of the Radical Republicans, co-authored the

Wade-Davis Bill (1864) to restrict readmission of southern states to

the Union. Lincoln refused to sign the bill; Wade was subsequently

accused of scheming to become president.

President Andrew Johnson poses regally with carefully manicured

fingernails. Although Johnson hated southern aristocrats, he

sometimes craved their approval.