Ecstatic Nation by Brenda Wineapple

Author:Brenda Wineapple
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2013-03-10T16:00:00+00:00

THOUGH HORATIO ALGER, JR., would not invent Ragged Dick until 1867, the tale of rags to riches was already a mainstay of American folklore, at least in the North. Southern planters were less enthralled, and Edward Pollard, the fire-eating editor of the Richmond Examiner, cast a very cold eye on the self-made man—or what was known in his circle as a “scrub.” Andy Johnson was a scrub: impeccable clothes couldn’t conceal the gaucheness of that backwoods Tennessee tailor given to malapropisms. Johnson knew what the planters thought of him; in turn, he hated the Southern elite and their condescension. He hated their sense of superiority. He had fought them when they spouted off about secession. A Jacksonian Democrat, he had even joined up with Lincoln and the Republicans to defeat them, to preserve the Union, and, not coincidentally, to advance his career.

It wasn’t long after Johnson took the oath of office, though, that the Republicans realized that the new president wasn’t one of them either. When they requested a special session of Congress to deal with Reconstruction—Congress was not due to convene until the December after Lincoln’s assassination, almost seven months away—Johnson rebuffed them, and he took Reconstruction into his own hands. His plan for Reconstruction was a restoration—a restoration of the Union exactly as it was, just without slavery. He wouldn’t hear of rights of the freedmen and women. For Johnson made no secret of his racism. While seeming to conciliate the Republicans and to praise black troops, he was also heard to have said, “This is a country for white men and, by G-d, as long as I am president it shall be a government for white men.”

In May 1865 Johnson proclaimed a general and generous amnesty to Southerners willing to take the oath of allegiance; he excluded Confederate government and military leaders and those rich rebels whose taxable net worth exceeded $20,000 (he still hated the Southern aristocracy). Yet any of them could ask for a presidential pardon, and soon the White House teemed with supplicants looking not just for pardons but patronage, which Johnson regally dispensed. By the following year, Secretary of State Seward reported 7,197 pardons with an additional 707 on the way. Johnson also called for a convention of loyal citizens (a citizen was anyone who had been eligible to vote in 1860, so freedmen were excluded) to be held in North Carolina, and he appointed William Holden as the state’s governor. He appointed governors in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, and Texas. In South Carolina, he put Benjamin Perry into the governor’s seat even though Perry had been in the Confederate legislature during the war.

Though Johnson remained leery of federal control and was a firm advocate of states’ rights, he had never acknowledged secession. As far as he was concerned, the eleven states of the Confederacy had not legally seceded, which also meant that the Southern states had not left the Union nor relinquished their right to govern themselves as they wished. For instance,

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