After Appomattox by Gregory P. Downs

Author:Gregory P. Downs [Downs, Gregory P.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780674426160
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2015-04-09T06:00:00+00:00

The questions of war and peace, of voting rights and civil rights, now depended upon the Senate. Once again parliamentary maneuvering helped shape the final outcome. When the Senate met, both the Louisiana bill and Stevens’s broader occupation act were up for consideration. If the Senate had passed the Louisiana legislation first and remade that state’s government, it is possible that the Senate might then have used the occupation bill as a warning to other rebel states: take action or your government, like Louisiana’s, will be completely set aside. Or it is possible, if less likely, that the Louisiana bill might have been extended to the entire South; this would have swept away the existing governments and disfranchised some rebels. “Each is excellent,” Charles Sumner said. “One is the beginning of a true reconstruction; the other is the beginning of a true protection.”20 Mistakenly confident that the occupation bill would pass quickly, the Louisiana bill’s sponsor deferred his act’s place in line to let the Senate take up occupation first.

The Senate then agonized over the same question that divided the House: Should a bill extending the war include terms of peace? Under intense pressure from other Republicans, the bill’s sponsor, George Williams of Oregon, urged the Senate to extend occupation indefinitely and leave the peace terms for the next Congress. At this crucial juncture, the crusty, sometimes-brilliant Democratic senator Reverdy Johnson intervened. Fearing that the occupation bill would lead either to indefinite military rule or to a new wave of demands on the rebel states, Reverdy Johnson changed the debate by adding peace terms. With peace terms on the table, Republicans now fell to arguing with each other. Some Republicans defended an indefinite occupation. “Are we, who have stood here for five long bloody years and witnessed the exercise of military power over these rebel States, to be frightened now by a declaration” that they would “institute military rule?” Senator Lot Morrill asked. The bill was simply an “article of war” to “preserve order throughout a country where there is no civil authority. That is all.” Although Fessenden mostly stayed quiet during this debate, he rejected any “express condition” in peace terms; Congress should not be bound by any promises to restore peace. Peacetime Republicans in the Senate, however, echoed Bingham’s and Blaine’s arguments in the House that military rule must be a means, not an end. Every month spent in wartime risked undermining the nation’s legal order.21

After hours of debate, many Republicans agreed to pass peace terms that included black suffrage. Military government would in fact be not an end but a means. They would intervene, but only briefly and only to restore normal law. They based their bill upon Congressman James Blaine’s failed House amendment that both declared a time of war and cleared a path for peace. Stating that there were “no legal State governments” in the rebel states, the bill divided them into five military districts under commanders and granted those commanders power to use military commissions; to return, the states would need to form new constitutions through biracial suffrage.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.