Reconstructing Republicanism

This is BackStory. I’m Peter Onuf.

ED: I’m Ed Ayers.

BRIAN: And I’m Brian Balogh. Today on the show, we’re taking the long view on political factions.

PETER: Our next story begins as the Civil War ends. Congressional leaders were grappling with how to readmit a ruined South to the Union. The contingent that took the hardest line was called the Radical Republicans. They push for immediate and full equality for African Americans, something that would eventually be guaranteed by the 14th Amendment Citizenship and Equal Protection clauses.

But they met with resistance from moderates, who feared anarchy and disorder in the conquered South. The Radicals also wanted to see former Confederates punished, well the moderates favored a more lenient approach.

BRIAN: Annette Gordon-Reed is a legal historian at Harvard. She says the radicals had often sparred with Abraham Lincoln, fearing his vision of Reconstruction was too soft on southern traitors. And so when he was assassinated and his vice president Andrew Johnson assumed the presidency, the radicals thought they finally had a true ally in the White House.

ANNETTE GORDON-REED: He was seen as someone who was going to be punishing towards the Confederates, that he was very much interested in transforming and shaking up the way of life. He was considered– well, he was a lower-class white person, and he’d always resented the grandees of the South. And people thought this was his chance to stick it to them

At one point, Thaddeus Stevens, a radical Republican, thought, well. He was not happy that Lincoln was gone. But he thought now we have somebody who we could work with. And it turned out to be exactly the opposite of that.

ED: So all this takes place in just a few months. Right off the bat, it’s very clear that Johnson is their enemy.

ANNETTE GORDON-REED: Yes. And he thinks that the president should control, as Lincoln did, that the president should control reconstruction. They thought that they should.

But it’s really about, the driving issue is, what are we going to do with– and they would have said, at the time– the negro and the South? And he has one idea, and they have another. And they go to war.

They would pass things, and then he would appoint people who he knew or felt would not carry forth the laws. His failure to protect people who were being killed, the freedmen who were being persecuted in the south. There are lots of things that they thought amounted to his not carrying out his duties as president. But they were hoping for something, some way to get him. And the impeachment was that.

ED: So the radicals are furious at Johnson generally. But they decide to go after him for something specific in order to really bring him to the court of justice. How does this impeachment process evolve, and what is it that they’re really trying to nail him for?

ANNETTE GORDON-REED: Well, they’re nailing him for violating the Tenure of Office Act. And the act forbade the president from removing anyone from the cabinet without congressional approval. And he wanted to remove Stanton, Secretary of War.

Stanton’s problem was that he opposed Johnson’s leniency towards the southern states. The South is under military rule at this point, and if you had somebody in a Secretary of War who was not actually enforcing this notion of bringing blacks into citizenship– protecting blacks, really is what it was. Well, the whole thing would be lost.

So they were infuriated. The Radical Republicans were infuriated when he tried to remove this one, the person who would be responsible for implementing their program, what they thought was the right way to go. So that was the cause of the problem and brought about the impeachment.

ED: So as it turns out, the Radical Republicans fail to convict Johnson in their impeachment proceedings. What I wonder is were they made more radical by Johnson’s intransigence? Did they come up with a more radical plan, precisely because they had such an opponent in the White House?

ANNETTE GORDON-REED: Well, we do get the 14th Amendment out of this. Ultimately, his recalcitrance leads to them suggesting that the only way to get around this is to pass the 14th Amendment, which brought blacks into citizenship, because it’s not clear at this point what status the enslaved people had.

So the 14th Amendment establishes this by making African Americans citizens. The 15th Amendment gives them the right to vote unintimidated, theoretically unintimidated. And so this makes blacks true Americans. For the first time, there’s no ambiguity about this.

Because then it becomes a part of the Constitution, and there are more ways to work with that, as opposed to the general laws, the civil rights acts, and things like that that were passed during this time period. So it’s one of those situations where you decry what Johnson did, it but in the end there was a good result.

ED: But as you know so well, for generations people thought the radicals were the bad guys, that heavies, in the story of Reconstruction. You know, that they seem just maniacal in their determination to push the nation too far, too fast on African American rights. Are the radicals now really enshrined as the pioneers of justice, that they were a faction who was right?

ANNETTE GORDON-REED: Well, I don’t know that that’s the consensus of all members of the country. But I do think the predominant view is that they were certainly right. Because if you think of African Americans as people, as real people, it’s a bit difficult, to, I think, make excuses for the failure to treat them as human beings.

I mean, people say you look at history through the eyes of people in the past. But the question is, whose eyes? And I think we’re at a moment now when people are looking at the past, particularly in the South and slavery, through the eyes of African Americans, of the people who were oppressed, and the people who wanted to help them.

So I think it’s, as you know, schools of history change. But we are in a moment where people said, these individuals had foresight. They were irritating. They were in much the same way as the abolitionists. They were irritating. People thought they had one idea, that they were harping on one thing to the exclusion of other considerations. But I do think they are seen as a vanguard.

ED: Annette Gordon-Reed is a professor at Harvard Law School, and the author of a recent biography of Andrew Johnson for the American Presidents series.