The Death of Lincoln and the Rebirth of America: The Story of America Series [Ep. 32]

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Speaker 1: This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories. Up next, another installment of our series about us, “The Story of America” series, with Hillsdale College professor and author of “Land of Hope,” Bill McLay. We begin in Washington during a time of celebration. The end of the Civil War had come. It was Good Friday, 1865. Abraham Lincoln was set to attend the play Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theater. Let’s get into it.

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Speaker 2: It may have been one of the happiest moments of Lincoln’s last…

00:00:43
Speaker 3: few years, if not his entire life.

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Speaker 2: At 10 o’clock p.m. in the play’s third act, John Wilkes Booth entered the President’s box, pistoled in his. After firing a shot at Lincoln’s head at close range, the actor leapt onto the stage and shouted, “Sic semper turanus torontos!”—thus always to tyrants. Never before had such a true believer done more damage to his own cause.

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Speaker 3: Because the South could not have had

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Speaker 2: a better advocate than Lincoln, there were still many unresolved issues to address after the Civil War. What was a reunification of the nation going to look like? Should Southern rebels be punished, and if so, hah, which ones? Should the leaders of the Confederacy face treason charges? And what about all those Confederate soldiers? What should happen to them, if anything? The war ravaged the South, devastating the region economically, with many of their great cities reduced to mere ruins. Their production capacities, too, were ravaged. Property values had plummeted. No money made its way into the South to help rebuild. Slavery had been gutted from the region, and with it, much of the production capacity was gutted too, as slave labor had been the backbone of the South’s most valuable crop: cotton. Last but not least, there was the issue of the recently freed slaves. As the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass said, he was free from the old plantation, but he had nothing but the dusty road under his feet. These were big questions. There would be two different approaches—broadly different approaches—among and between Northerners. There were some who wanted to bring the Southern states back into the Union with the least number of complications, including punishment, as possible, so the South could rebuild. There was another contingent of Northerners who believed the South should be punished—punished severely—and with it create a total and complete transformation culturally and socially of the whole region. It was a kind of scorched-earth approach. Well, Lincoln had been thinking about this issue ever since before becoming president, before secession occurred.

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Speaker 3: He was always mindful

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Speaker 2: of the preservation of the Union, and he came up with a very interesting solution to the problem. He concluded that because secession itself had been illegal, the Southern Confederate states had never actually left the Union, as Euclidean logic would have it. And Lincoln was a great admirer of Euclid. If the South never left the Union, what would it require for the South to return to the Union?

00:04:22
Speaker 3: Not very much.

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Speaker 2: Indeed, Lincoln, as early as 1863, was thinking not just conceptually about this idea, but practically. He came up with a plan to pardon any one member of the Confederacy who would take an oath of loyalty to the Constitution and the Union itself and swore to agree to the end of slavery as a practice in the South. The state could then be readmitted if ten percent of the voters. Ten percent of the voters made these pledges. It was a remarkably generous plan. It was generous; it was graceful. It was aimed toward an unstinting reunion of the states and even strengthening of the idea of the American Union. Well, a lot of Republicans didn’t like it. They thought it was not merely far too lenient, but just plain ill-conceived. They were more convinced that the entire social system and network of the South—the class society, the planter society that drove it—had to be destroyed and replaced with something new and better. Moreover, these same Republicans believed this was a decision for Congress to make, not the executive branch. They passed a bill, the Wade-Davis Bill, which required a majority of voters in each state—not ten percent, of majority of voters in these states—just where not just allegiance to the Union, but that they had never been disloyal to the Union. Lincoln exercised his pocket veto power, which meant that he simply didn’t sign the bill; allowed it to expire unsigned. Republicans who put forward the bill were incensed at this; they accused him of exceeding his constitutional authority, though on what ground was unclear. He was precisely exercising his constitutional authority by pocket vetoing.

00:06:33
Speaker 3: the legislation that he opposed; he clearly had the right to do it.

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Speaker 2: But it was trickier than that because the actual authority on the issue, what to do with the states that seceded for the Union, did not have a clear constitutional authority. This was an eventuality that no one had anticipated in 1787.

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Speaker 3: So, how to bring them back into the Union?

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Speaker 2: He had no real or clear guy within the text of the Constitution. America was sailing into uncharted…

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Speaker 1: waters. And uncharted orders, indeed. Whoever makes the claim today that we’ve never been more divided or never faced more difficult tasks and challenges in front of us, has to listen to this story. More of this story here on Our American Stories. This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories. And all of our history stories are brought to us by our generous sponsors, including Hillsdale College, where students go to learn all the things that are beautiful in life and all the things that matter in life. If you can’t get to Hillsdale, Hillsdale will come to you with their free and terrific online courses. Go to Hillsdale.edu. That’s Hillsdale.edu. And we return to Our American Stories, in our “Story of America” series, with Hillsdale College professor and author of “Land of Hope,” Bill McLay. When we last left off, Bill was covering the huge questions about what would happen to the South and what would happen to America after the Civil War. The biggest question of all: how should the states that left the Union be treated? Let’s return to the story. Here again is Bill McLay.

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Speaker 2: Lincoln’s very last public address, just two days before General Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House, took the issue head-on. The subject of the day for Lincoln was whether or not the State of Louisiana should be accepted back into the Union. The state’s new constitution abolished slavery. That pleased Lincoln, but it was enough for the Republicans looking to reconstitute and recreate the South. Those Republicans wrote to Lincoln to express their dissatisfaction and outrage. Lincoln’s speech included a masterful rebuttal: “We all agree that the seceded states, so-called, are out of their proper relation with the Union; and that the sole object of government, civil and military, in regard to those states, is to again get them into that proper practical relation. I believe it is not only possible, but in fact easier to do this without deciding or even considering whether these states have ever been out of them, than with it. Finding themselves safely at home, it would be utterly immaterial whether they had ever been abroad.”

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Speaker 3: What a wonderful phrase!

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Speaker 2: I just had to stop and say, “Let us all join in doing the acts necessary to restoring the proper practical relations between these states and the Union, each forever after innocently indulged his own opinion whether, in doing the acts, he brought the states from without into the Union or only gave them proper assistance, they never having been out of it.” Lincoln, the masterful lawyer he was—and a man prone to precision and wordsmithing and definitions from his professional background as a lawyer—argued brilliantly for a more generous view of these matters, a more…

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Speaker 3: impractical view, as he stressed the…

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Speaker 2: key to America’s future lies not in defining things too precisely. Sometimes that is true. And by the way, anyone who categorically condemns lawyers ought to take a look at Lincoln and the degree to which Lincoln’s greatness as a president owes to his skill as a lawyer. On the day of Lincoln’s assassination, he spoke to his Cabinet. He spoke presciently about the future of the Union and reunification. Here’s what he said: “I hope there will be no persecution, no bloody work after the war is over. Enough lives have been sacrificed. We must extinguish our resentment if we expect harmony and union. There has been too much of a desire on the part of some of our very good friends to be masters, to interfere with and dictate to those states, to treat people not as fellow citizens.”

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Speaker 3: “There is too little respect for their rights.”

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Speaker 2: I do not sympathize with these feelings. Such a great thing for him to say, and noted that he says our very good friends are in danger of becoming masters. He clearly means that word to sting a little bit, because it makes reference to the very institution that his very good friends—and he—had devoted their lives to abolishing. We will never know how things might have been with Lincoln at the helm. He died that Easter weekend at a boarding house across the street from Ford’s Theater, in a…

00:12:39
Speaker 3: day of white rain.

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Speaker 2: If anything, Lincoln’s murder only made things worse for the South, as national feelings turned against the former…

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Speaker 3: states of the Confederacy.

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Speaker 2: And it made matters worse that his Vice President, Andrew Johnson—who was a Southerner, who was from Tennessee, who was a Democrat, who’d been chosen as a unity candidate. Well, Johnson had none of Lincoln’s statesmanship, eloquence, grace, or generosity. So, who was Andrew Johnson? He hailed from Tennessee. He grew up like Lincoln: humbly. He deeply resented—I think “hated” is not too strong a word—the wealthy planters, whom he held responsible for the plight of the South. That would, in turn, be the reason the Republicans in Congress embraced him. Many in Congress thought he’d be such an improvement over Lincoln. But these Republicans miscalculated Johnson’s hostility toward Southern aristocrats.

00:13:58
Speaker 3: it turns out, was not due

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Speaker 2: to his empathy for poor Southern farmers. He just resented his social superiors. Status, not justice, powered much of Johnson’s resentment. He also agreed with the prevailing Southern prejudices against Black people and had little, if any, objection to slavery; and he most certainly did not share his fellow Republicans’ desire to see the South humiliated and punished. Johnson reserved had desire for the rich planters, and the rich planters alone. So, Johnson was a wrong man for the wrong time, and he was wrong for other reasons as well. Though the job required a man with a view toward the long term and a temperament that was suited to withstand the bumps and bruises, slings and arrows of everyday political life, Johnson was not that man. He was insecure; he was filled with anxiety and paranoia, and his paranoia extended to his being an outsider and feeling that all the organized forces of society were against him. Johnson, unlike Lincoln, proved that not all common men can rise to the occasion, no matter how ambitious they might be.

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Speaker 3: So, Johnson’s problems

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Speaker 2: began in May of 1865, not long after his accession to the presidency, when he put forward a Reconstruction plan that was only slightly tougher than Lincoln’s. By the time Congress convened in December, all eleven of the ex-Confederate states had met the conditions that they were allowed to return to the Union, including ratifying the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery, and electing senators and representatives. What remained was for Congress to accept and to seat them, but that was not to be. First, none of the Southern states had extended voting rights to Blacks; and second, there were a number of former Confederate leaders in the new congressional delegations, including the former Vice President of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens. Many Southern legislatures were also passing new Black Codes, so-called, that restricted the rights of former slaves, making life for many freed Blacks nearly indistinguishable from slavery. Johnson’s approach was summarily dismissed by Congress, in fact; and a Joint Committee on Reconstruction was formed

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Speaker 3: to review the matter.

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Speaker 2: Highlighted was evidence of the mistreatment of Blacks in the Southern states. Also settled was where the power to settle the issue of Reconstruction and reunion rested: in Congress. That’s right, Congress decided it was Congress’s role to determine how the Southern states might be restored, not. And Johnson didn’t help his own cause: he vetoed a civil rights law designed to challenge the Black Codes.

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Speaker 3: What happened next, though—with what made history.

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Speaker 2: Congress overrode Johnson’s veto, and the bill became law. It was the first time in American history that that had happened. What soon happened the second time: Congress overrode Johnson’s veto on the extension of the Freedmen’s Bureau. It was the beginning of a new era, and not just on the Reconstruction front, but also in the definition of relations between Congress and the executive branch. And it was the beginning of the end for the Johnson presidency.

00:17:48
Speaker 1: The story of Reconstruction, and we’re just getting started. “Our Story of America” series continues here on Our American Stories.