After Lincoln

How the North Won the Civil War and Lost the Peace

A. J. Langguth

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781451617344
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

A brilliant evocation of the post-Civil War era by the acclaimed author of Patriots and Union 1812. After Lincoln tells the story of the Reconstruction, which set back black Americans and isolated the South for a century. With Lincoln's assassination, his "team of rivals, " in Doris Kearns Goodwin's phrase, was left adrift. President Andrew Johnson, a former slave owner from Tennessee, was challenged by Northern Congressmen, Radical Republicans led by Thaddeus Stephens and Charles Sumner, who wanted to punish the defeated South. When Johnson's policies placated the rebels at the expense of the black freed men, radicals in the House impeached him for trying to fire Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. Johnson was saved from removal by one vote in the Senate trial, presided over by Salmon Chase. Even William Seward, Lincoln's closest ally, seemed to waver.By the 1868 election, united Republicans nominated Ulysses Grant, Lincoln's winning Union general. The night of his victory, Grant lamented to his wife, "I'm afraid I'm elected." His attempts to reconcile Southerners with the Union and to quash the rising Ku Klux Klan were undercut by post-war greed and corruption.Reconstruction died unofficially in 1887 when Republican Rutherford Hayes joined with the Democrats in a deal that removed the last federal troops from South Carolina and Louisiana. In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson signed a bill with protections first proposed in 1872 by the Radical Senator from Massachusetts, Charles Sumner.

Charles Sumner

CHAPTER 1

CHARLES SUMNER (1865)

CHARLES SUMNER DISAGREED, VEHEMENTLY, WITH General Grant’s vision of life after the Civil War ended. A fifty-four-year-old senator from Massachusetts, Sumner had already been a casualty of that war, four years before its first shot was fired.

Sumner’s grandfather had fought in the American Revolution, but he had inherited his abiding fervor from his father, who opposed segregated schools and the law forbidding marriage between whites and blacks. A lifelong crusader, the elder Sumner was fond of saying, “The duties of life are more than life,” and he passed on that philosophy to his twins, a boy and a girl, born in 1811. Although Matilda Sumner died at twenty-one, her brother Charles never forgot the lesson.

From Boston Latin Grammar School, Charles went on to Harvard, where he strongly impressed his law professor Joseph Story, who was also a justice on the U.S. Supreme Court.

But a trip to Washington soured Sumner on a political career. He developed a loathing for the theatrical airs of the Senate and for what he derided as “newspaper fame.” Apart from Judge Story, he found the Court no better. Calling on Chief Justice Roger Taney, Sumner was disdainful of his “paltry collection of books, which seem to be very seldom used.”

He chose instead to travel extensively throughout Europe, where he picked up fluency in German, Italian, French, and Spanish. Members of the British aristocracy were taken with this young Yankee’s erudition and welcomed him into their circle for fox hunting at their country estates.

Sumner dined at the Garrick Club and took tea with Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein. His hostess forgot his nationality so completely that as they chatted she exclaimed, “Thank God, I have kept clear of those Americans!” Sumner pretended not to hear.

Invited by lawyers to Guildhall, London’s administrative center, Sumner was pleased to find a marble bust of an early British abolitionist in a place of honor. At Windsor Castle, he toured the private rooms, where he found the royal dining hall unappealingly “showy and brilliant.”

When Sumner went home after eighteen months, it was only because his money had run out.

• • •

Sumner’s father had died during his travels. Back in Boston, he went to live with his mother on Hancock Street while he practiced law and oversaw the upbringing of his brothers and sisters. Friends decided that Europe had sent Charles home more portly but better tailored.

Sumner found that, at six-foot-four and with a powerful voice, he was becoming a popular speaker despite his weakness for fustian language. In the past, Boston’s traditional Fourth of July oration had left John Adams unimpressed. By the time the nation’s second president died in 1826, he was complaining that the event featured “young men of genius describing scenes they never saw” and professing “feelings they never felt.”

When Sumner was chosen for the honor of delivering the oration in 1845, he resolved to do better. The familiar ritual at Tremont Temple began with a prayer, the reading of the Declaration of Independence, and music from a choir of a hundred girls. Then Sumner rose in a dress coat with gilt buttons and white trousers to face an audience of two thousand patriots. Barely referring to notes, he spoke for the next two hours.

Sumner began by denouncing the recent annexation of Texas because it would probably lead to war with Mexico. Amid murmurs of disapproval from supporters of President Polk’s war policy, Sumner spelled out his theme:

“In our age there can be no peace that is not honorable; there can be no war that is not dishonorable.”

Sumner lauded the glories of nearby Harvard University before pointing out that after two centuries, the school had accumulated property worth only $703,175. In contrast, the warship Ohio docked in Boston Harbor had cost $834,845.

“War is known as the last reason of kings. Let it be no reason of our republic. Let us renounce and throw off forever the yoke of a tyranny”—war—“more oppressive than any in the annals of the world.”

It was far from the thrilling martial rhetoric his audience had anticipated. Afterward, during the dinner at Faneuil Hall, Boston’s politicians and military officers angrily disavowed Sumner’s sentiments. To restore a semblance of good humor, the dinner chairman suggested that the problem with his friend Sumner was that since he was a bachelor, he knew nothing of domestic strife and therefore nothing of war.

But at least one Boston general admired Sumner’s reaction to the discord he had aroused: He withstood “all these fusillades with the most quiet good nature, and even with good-humored smiles,” the man reported. “No man could have behaved with more exact and refined courtesy.”

• • •

When Judge Story died two months later, Sumner debated whether he wanted to succeed him as head of Harvard’s law school. He worried that taking the position would mean censoring his opinions; he would “no longer be a free man.” But after his Fourth of July oration, Harvard settled the question for him, and the job was not offered.

Over the next two years, Sumner became appalled by the compromises that Senator Daniel Webster and other Northern Whigs were making to preserve the Union. In response, Sumner joined with a group including Salmon P. Chase of Ohio to form a Free Soil Party.

As a Free Soiler, Sumner ran against a Whig congressman in 1848, lost badly, and retreated to the practice of law. But when President Millard Fillmore appointed Webster as his secretary of state, the naming of Webster’s replacement fell to the commonwealth’s legislature.

Many of its members were put off by what they considered Sumner’s arrogance and self-righteousness. These days, when he was invited to speak, Sumner insisted that he appear on a stage and not behind a pulpit, which he called “a devilish place.” To heighten the insult, he added, “I do not wonder that people in it are dull.”

That uncompromising spirit had closed the doors of most of Boston’s first families to him. Even his closest friend from Harvard, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, lamented Sumner’s growing obsession. “Nothing but politics now. Oh, where are those genial days when literature was the topic of our conversation?”

Despite those misgivings, Sumner was sent to the U.S. Senate by the margin of a single vote. Once there, he became an unyielding champion of his father’s ideals and took satisfaction in being described as the conscience of New England.

Sumner was unperturbed by his unpopularity. Ideas mattered to him, the men who held them hardly at all. When he had come across congenial spirits, they tended to be poets and writers—Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Greenleaf Whittier. And the circle was exclusively male. One friend observed that at any gathering, Sumner “would at once desert the most blooming beauty to talk to the plainest of men.”

In the years leading to the war, Sumner had remained a bachelor.

• • •

If Charles Sumner was a product of the culture that had produced the stern John Quincy Adams, Representative Preston S. Brooks reflected—like Henry Clay—the more indulgent life of the South and West. By the time he graduated from village grammar schools, Brooks had become so devoted to local taverns that the faculty of South Carolina College felt compelled to tighten its disciplinary code. Even so, Brooks was expelled before he could graduate for what the college described as “riotous behavior.”

Moving on to practice law in Edgefield, South Carolina, Brooks was twenty-one when he fought his first duel—turning a trifling affront into a point of honor. Because dueling was illegal in the state, he met his antagonist on a nearby Georgia island. Brooks took a bullet in his abdomen and thigh. The other man was also wounded, but both of them survived.

At six-foot, Brooks was nearly as tall and imposing as Sumner, but his life involved far more romance. When his first wife died after two years of marriage, Brooks married her sister. A supporter of the war with Mexico, he went off jauntily to fight. A fever soon sent him home again, but his service contributed to his military bearing.

As a Democrat who did not favor immediate secession, Brooks was rewarded for his moderation in 1852, with election to Congress from South Carolina. There he joined his cousin, the state’s senator, Andrew Pickens Butler, and he was present in the Senate chambers on March 19, 1856, when Sumner of Massachusetts rose to argue that for Kansas to enter the Union, it must outlaw slavery.

• • •

Sumner had already annoyed fellow senators in 1852 by urging repeal of the Fugitive Slave Act at a time when both parties wanted to slip past that year’s presidential election without debating the issue. Senate leaders did their best to stop Sumner from speaking, but he finally got the floor and introduced a motion to end the requirement that every citizen, North or South, join in apprehending runaway slaves. Sumner attracted three votes besides his own.

Although his crusade failed, Sumner’s eloquence drew disaffected Whigs and Free Soilers to another new movement. In September 1854, they came together in Worcester, Massachusetts, to form a coalition they called the Republican Party.

Other Whigs, however, were still put off by Sumner’s intemperance. For the time being, men like Abraham Lincoln of Illinois and Henry Seward of New York saw a brighter future with the Whigs than with the Republicans or another splinter group, the secretive and anti-immigrant Know Nothings.

And yet, the Know Nothings did much better than any other slate in the election for the Massachusetts legislature—377 Know Nothings won, against a single Whig, one Democrat, and one Republican.

Sumner responded with renewed passion. On a trip through Kentucky, he absorbed the lessons of his first extended exposure to slavery. In Lexington, he watched a slave auction and saw a coach driver whipping a Negro. At his hotel, a black child who was waiting on tables was knocked to the floor by a white man’s blow to his head.

Back home, Sumner’s speeches berated the Know Nothings—“I am not disposed to place any check upon the welcome of foreigners”—and stumped energetically for the Republicans. But within his new party, schisms were already arising. Men who shared Sumner’s resolute politics—Senator Benjamin Wade of Ohio, Congressman Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania—were being called radicals.

• • •

By the time Sumner rose for his next two-day oration, the label had become official: Sumner was a Radical Republican. Yet he considered his speech simply a historical review of slavery, and he had shown a draft to New York senator Henry Seward, also an abolitionist but far less impatient and outspoken than Sumner. Seward had not supported Sumner’s repeal of the Fugitive Slave Act four years earlier, and now he urged Sumner to delete any personal attacks from his speech.

Henry Seward already knew, however, how stiff-necked Sumner could be. Once he had asked Sumner, as a personal favor, to support legislation that would benefit a New York steamship line. Sumner refused. He said that he had not been sent to the Senate to get Seward re-elected.

Seward had snapped, “Sumner, you’re a damned fool.”

Sumner ended up voting for the bill, but the two men did not speak for months. Their coolness thawed, partly because Seward’s wife, Frances, had always been unstinting in her praise of Sumner’s “clear moral perceptions” and his being “so fearless a champion of human rights.” But even she had advised Sumner against denouncing his colleagues by name.

Sumner ignored her advice and shifted from a mild review of the Kansas affair to biting ridicule. He assailed President Franklin Pierce for bowing to slave owners and Illinois senator Stephen Douglas for supporting a proslavery community within the Kansas territory.

In the past, Sumner had enjoyed his place on the Senate floor next to Preston Brooks’s cousin, Andrew Butler. In fact, Sumner had once paid him a high compliment: If only Butler had been born in New England, Sumner said, “he would have been a scholar or, at least, a well educated man.”

But Sumner’s opposition to the Fugitive Slave Act had destroyed any traces of friendship. Now Sumner claimed that there was nothing Butler touched “that he does not disfigure.” The accusation was especially pointed since it could be taken as referring to the defect in Butler’s lip that distorted his speech. Sumner went on to add that Butler “cannot open his mouth, but out there flies a blunder.”

Butler was not in the chamber as Sumner mocked the way he had boasted about South Carolina’s venerable traditions. “He cannot surely have forgotten its shameful imbecility from slavery, confessed throughout the Revol...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Cast of Characters
• April 14, 1865
• Chapter 1: Charles Sumner (1865)
• Chapter 2: William Henry Seward (1865)
• Chapter 3: Jefferson Davis (1865)
• Chapter 4: Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback (1865)
• Chapter 5: Andrew Johnson (1865)
• Chapter 6: Oliver Otis Howard (1865)
• Chapter 7: Thaddeus Stevens (1865–1866)
• Chapter 8: The Fourteenth Amendment (1866)
• Chapter 9: Edwin Stanton (1867–1868)
• Chapter 10: Salmon Portland Chase (1868)
• Chapter 11: Benjamin Franklin Wade (1868)
• Chapter 12: Nathan Bedford Forrest (1868)
• Chapter 13: Ulysses S. Grant (1869)
• Chapter 14: Gold and Santo Domingo (1869–1870)
• Chapter 15: Ku Klux Klan (1870–1872)
• Chapter 16: Horace Greeley (1872)
• Chapter 17: Hiram Revels (1872–1873)
• Chapter 18: Grant’s Second Term (1873–1876)
• Chapter 19: Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1876)
• Chapter 20: Jim Crow (1877)
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Photo Credits
• Copyright