Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2)

J >> James Gillespie Blaine >> Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2)

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 | 41 | 42 | 43 | 44 | 45 | 46 | 47 | 48 | 49 | 50 | 51 | 52 | 53 | 54 | 55 | 56 | 57 | 58 | 59 | 60 | 61 | 62 | 63 | 64 | 65 | 66 | 67 | 68 | 69 | 70 | 71 | 72

With all the advantages of old association and in numberless instances
of kindly relation with the colored race, the former masters showed
themselves singularly deficient in the tact and management necessary
to win the negroes and bind them closely to their interest, in the
new conditions which emancipation had created. Of the evil results
that flowed from the contest now about to ensue--a contest that had
many elements of provocation and of wrong on both sides--one of the
most remarkable features was the complete control which the white men
from the North, entire strangers to the negro, to his habits and to
his prejudices, so readily obtained over him. The late slave-masters
did not adapt themselves to the new situation. They gave way to
repining and regretting, to sulking and to anger, to resentment and
revenge, and thereby lost a great opportunity for binding together the
two races in those ties of sympathy and confidence which must be
maintained as an indispensable condition of prosperity, or even of
domestic order and the reign of law, in the Southern States. The lack
of moral courage among the physically brave men of the South has
already been indicated and illustrated. It was something of this
same defect that held back the slave-masters from the condescension, as
they esteemed it, of establishing any relation whatever with the negro
in his new condition of freedom. Such action was frowned upon by the
public opinion of this class throughout the South, and for lack of
bold leadership at the critical period, for lack of that consideration
which in many subsequent instances has been lavished upon the colored
man, the current of fatal prejudice was set strongly against the old
master in the mind of his former slave. Events, as they developed in
the stirring and sorrowful years that followed, were but a continual
proof of that form of original blunder on the part of the Southern
whites, which in affairs of civil administration is worse than a crime.

In excuse, or at least in explanation, of this unfortunate blunder on
the part of Southern men, the obstinacy and wrong-headed course of
President Johnson must be pleaded. It was his causeless, voluntary,
unpardonable quarrel with his party which misled Southern men at the
time when they most needed lessons of wisdom and moderation. The
different result which we may well conceive might have followed in the
South under the considerate and kindly spirit which Mr. Lincoln would
have brought to the problem, gives us by contrast some faint
appreciation of the enormity of Johnson's conduct and of the evil
effects flowing from it. At the very moment when the President should
have stood as a generous mediator, calming the irritation of the South
--an irritation inevitably incident to defeat--and restraining
somewhat, at least in the manner of preferring them, the demands and
requirements which the Government in its hour of victory was justified
in making, Johnson committed the grievous fault of espousing the
Southern cause and quarreling with the party which had confided to him
the power he was abusing.

Under the patronage and protection of the President, Southern men
would have been more or less than human if they had not grown arrogant
and defiant towards the men of the North. The chivalric sympathy which
always moves the magnanimous in their treatment of a fallen foe, was
therefore drowned in the indignation to which Northern men were
naturally moved by provocations as unexpected as they were
extraordinary. Stimulated by the protection of the President and
encouraged by his contumacious quarrel with Congress, the South was
driven from one unwise step to another, until the entire situation
became hopelessly entangled, and every movement affected by anger
and passion;--the North resolving more and more to insist on the fruits
of victory, the South resolving more and more to act as though they
had conquered in the contest. It was not unnatural, under the
anxieties and discouragements of the crisis, that the South should
have clung to Mr. Johnson for protection; but in the calm review
which the lapse of twenty years affords, the most ardent Southern
partisan must see that the President's policy was at enmity with the
interest and happiness of his section.

It is not to be forgotten, however, that Mr. Johnson's course was
marked by the inherent qualities of his mind. He had two signal
defects, either of which would impair his fitness for Executive duty;
united they rendered him incapable of efficient administration:--he
was conceited and he was obstinate. Conceit without obstinacy may be
overcome by the advice of judicious counselors; united with obstinacy
it carries its possessor beyond the bounds of prudence, almost beyond
the control of reason. Obstinacy united with good judgment is softened
into the virtue of firmness. It has often been said that self-made
men, as they are termed, are necessarily conceited. Like all
aphorisms, this must be taken with numberless exceptions, but it was
singularly applicable to Johnson, who was in all respects a self-made
man. His great career was never absent from his thoughts, and he was
always looking at himself as he fancied he would appear in history. He
came to regard himself as the hero upon a remarkable stage of action,
and naturally made the reflection that if he could have had in his
early years the advantages which so many possess without improving,
he would have made strides in life which would have left him without
rivals. It would be impossible to gain a full and correct apprehension
of Mr. Johnson's character without taking into account these qualities
--qualities which were both the remote and immediate cause of his
extraordinary career as Chief Magistrate.

The earlier Presidents, filled with the spirit of the convention that
formed the Constitution, were extremely careful in the use of the
veto-power. In eight years Washington used it but twice. Neither John
Adams nor Thomas Jefferson used it even once. Madison resorted to it
three times, Monroe only once, John Quincy Adams in not a single
instance. Under the first six Presidents, the veto-power had been used
but six times in all; unless there should be included some private
bills sent back for correction and not in any sense furnishing matter
of contest between parties. The country had thus been educated by the
sages of the era of the Constitution in the belief that only an
extraordinary occasion justified a resort to what, in the popular
dislike of its character, had received the name of "the one-man power."
President Jackson, therefore, surprised the country and shocked
conservative citizens by his frequent employment of this great
prerogative. During his term he thwarted the wish and the expressed
resolve of Congress no less than eleven times on measures of great
public consequence. Seven of these vetoes were of the kind which,
during his Presidency, received the name of "pocket-vetoes."

In Madison's administration a bill which reached the President during
the last ten days of the session failed by accident or inadvertence
to receive the President's signature, and did not become a law. Mr.
Webster is authority for saying that there was not a single instance
prior to the administration of General Jackson in which the President
by design omitted to sign a bill and yet did not return it to Congress.
"The silent veto," said he, "is the executive adoption of the present
administration." There had been instances in which, during a session
of Congress, a President, unwilling to approve and yet not prepared
to veto a measure, suffered it to become a law by the lapse of the
Constitutional period of ten days; but it was an entirely new device,
to defeat a bill by permitting the period of less than ten days to
expire at the close of the session--defeat it without action, without
expression of opinion, without the responsibility which justly attaches
to the Executive office. Commenting with great power, at the time,
upon the new use of the veto-power in all its forms by President
Jackson, Mr. Webster declared its tendency was "to disturb the harmony
which ought always to exist between Congress and the Executive, and to
turn that which the Constitution intended only as an extraordinary
remedy for extraordinary cases, into a common means of making Executive
discretion paramount to the discretion of Congress in the enactment of
laws." It was literally making the extreme medicine of the
Constitution its daily bread.

An example set by so strong a ruler as Jackson, especially in the
establishment of a practice so congenial to man's natural love of
power, was certain to be followed by other Presidents. It was
followed so vigorously indeed that the forty years succeeding Jackson's
advent to power presented a strong contrast with the forty years that
preceded it. The one began with Washington, the other ended with
Andrew Johnson. Mr. Van Buren, though in all respects a lineal heir
to the principles of Jackson, did not imitate him in the frequent use
of the veto-power. But Mr. Tyler on nine different occasions ran
counter to the action of Congress by the interposition of his veto.
Mr. Polk resorted to it in three signal instances, but neither General
Taylor nor Mr. Fillmore came in conflict with Congress on a single
measure. President Pierce almost rivaled General Jackson in the ten
vetoes with which he emphasized his own views as distinct from those of
Congress. Mr. Buchanan used his arbitrary power on four occasions
during his term. Mr. Lincoln permitted one bill to be defeated, as
already noted in these pages, by expiration of Congress, and arrested
the passage of another by direct use of his veto. President Johnson,
who in many features of his career has been suspected of an attempted
imitation of Jackson, far surpassed his great prototype in the use of
the veto-power, employing it directly in no less than twenty-one
instances, besides pocketing at least two bills of public importance.
The aggregate number of vetoes, therefore, in the forty years that
followed General Jackson's first election exceeded fifty, as against
six for the forty years preceding it.

It will not escape observation that the most frequent resort to the
veto has been by those Presidents who were chosen by the political
organization which has always declared its hostility to Executive
power. The Democratic party had its origin and its early growth in
the cry against the overshadowing influence of the Presidential office
--going so far in their denunciations as to declare that it was
aping royalty in its manners and copying monarchy in its prerogatives.
The men who made this outcry defeated John Quincy Adams who never used
the veto, and installed Jackson who resorted to it on all occasions
when his judgment differed from the conclusion of a majority of
Congress. Neither Taylor nor Fillmore--both reared in the Whig school
--ever attempted to defeat the will of Congress, though each wielded
Executive power at a time when questions even more exciting than
those of Jackson's era engaged public attention. Mr. Lincoln
presents a strong contrast with his predecessors,--Pierce and
Buchanan,--illustrating afresh the contradiction that the party
declaiming most loudly against Executive power has constantly abused
it. Mr. Tyler and Mr. Johnson were both chosen by the opponents of
the Democracy, but they were both reared in that school, and both
returned to it--exhibiting in their apostasy the readiness with which
the Democratic mind turns to the tyranny of the veto.

The success of reconstruction in the South carried with it the
ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment by the requisite number of
States. The result was duly certified by Mr. Seward as Secretary of
State, on the twenty-eighth day of July, 1868, and the Amendment was
thenceforward a part of the organic law of the nation. It had been
carried, from first to last, as a party measure--unanimously supported
by the Republicans, unanimously opposed by the Democrats. Its grand
and beneficent provisions failed to attract the vote of a single
Democratic member in any State Legislature in the whole Union.
Wherever the Democrats were in majority the Legislature rejected it,
and in every Legislature where the Republicans had control the
Democrats in minority voted against it. Not only was this true, but
the States of Ohio and New Jersey, which had ratified it in 1866-67
when their Legislatures were Republican, formally voted in 1868, when
the Democrats had come into power, to recall their assent to the
Amendment and to record their opposition to its adoption. It is very
seldom in the history of political issues, even when partisan feeling
is most deeply developed, that so absolute a division is found as was
recorded upon the question of adopting the Fourteenth Amendment. It
has not been easy in succeeding years to comprehend the deep-seated,
all-pervading hostility of the Democratic party to this great measure.
Even on the Thirteenth Amendment, containing the far more radical
proposition to abolish slavery, a few Democrats, moved by philanthropic
motives, broke from the restraint of party and honored themselves by
recording their votes on the side of humanity and justice; but on the
Fourteenth Amendment the line of Democratic hostility in Nation and
in State was absolutely unbroken.

It seems incredible that Democrats can be satisfied with the record
made by their party on this most grave and important question. Every
one of the many objects aimed at in the Fourteenth Amendment is
founded upon a basis of justice, of liberty, of an enlarged and
enlightened nationality. Its minor provisions might be regarded as
temporary in their nature, but its leading provisions are permanent
and are essential to the vitality of a true republic. Even those which
may be held as temporary deeply affect more than one generation of
American citizens, and are of themselves sufficiently important to
justify a great struggle for their adoption.

It was certainly of inestimable concern to the honor of the country
that those who had shed their blood and those who had given their
treasure for its defense, should have their claims upon the national
justice placed beyond the whim, or the caprice, or the malice of an
accidental majority in Congress. Nor would it have been wise to leave
open to those who in the conflict of arms had lost their slaves, the
temptation to besiege Congress and the Legislatures of their States
for compensation. Such an opportunity would have been a menace to the
public credit, and would have proved a constant source of corruption.
The Republican therefore said, "We shall incorporate the right of the
soldier to repayment, in the very Constitution of the Republic; and
shall in the same solemn manner decree that as slavery instigated the
drawing of the sword against the life of the nation, and justly
perished by the sword, its assumed value shall not be placed upon the
free people of the United States as a mortgage whose payment may be
exacted from their property and their toil." Against these just
provisions, which in their nature are limited as to time, the Democrats
in Congress and in every Legislature of the Union recorded an
absolutely unanimous vote.

Another provision of the Fourteenth Amendment, temporary in its
application, indeed necessarily limited to the existing generation,
was demanded by the Republicans. The great mass of those engaged in
the Rebellion were pardoned the moment their arms were laid down. But
the leaders who, in official position before the war, had solemnly
sworn to support the Constitution, were held to be far more guilty
than the multitude who followed them. They deliberately rebelled
against a government to which, on their consciences and on their oaths,
they had given their personal pledge of fidelity. The Republicans did
not propose to visit even these chief offenders with pains and
penalties; but they resolved to place in the Constitution a prohibition
upon their holding office under the National government until after
two-thirds of both branches of Congress, satisfied of their good
intentions, should remove their disabilities. The Democrats
unanimously voted against even this mild discipline to those who
precipitated the desperate war, thereby declaring their willingness,
if not their desire, that the most guilty should fare as well as the
innocent; that for example Mr. Toombs might resume his seat as a
senator from Georgia, Mr. Breckinridge as a senator from Kentucky, Mr.
Benjamin as a senator from Louisiana, Mr. Jefferson Davis as a senator
from Mississippi.

Still another provision of the Amendment which might prove temporary
in its application, or might prove permanent, as the South should
decide, was that relating to representation in Congress. On this point
the Republicans held, as has been so often repeated, that the negro
should not be included in the basis of representation until he was
admitted to suffrage. There is such absolute justice and fair dealing
in this proposition, that no reply which deserves to be called an
argument has ever been made to it. The original provision in the
Constitution by which three-fifths of the slaves were enumerated in
the basis of representation, agreed to originally as a compromise in
connection with the subject of direct taxation, had lost its relevancy
by reason of emancipation as decreed in the Thirteenth Amendment. The
question now before Congress was therefore a new one. It affected the
rights of States and the equality of citizens. To concede four and a
half millions of negroes to the basis of Southern representation, and
at the same time to confine the suffrage to the whites, was not merely
a harsh injustice to the colored race, but it was an insulting
discrimination against Northern white men. It gave, as was well said
at the time, a far greater influence in National affairs to the vote of
the Confederate solider in the South than to the vote of the Union
soldier in the North. In Congressional districts where the colored
race constituted one-half of the total population (and in many
instances the proportion was even larger), the vote of one white man
offset the vote of two in a Northern district where suffrage was
impartial. This ratio of influence went into the Electoral College,
and gave to the white men of South Carolina, Mississippi and Louisiana
double the power of that enjoyed by white men in New York, Illinois
and California. The loss of Representatives to the Northern States, or
more properly speaking the gain to the Southern States on existing
numbers, would be nearly one-eighth of the entire House, and fully
one-quarter of those likely to occupy seats on the Democratic side of
the chamber. In the Electoral College, the loss to the North and the
gain to the South would be nearly in the same ratio. In the rapid
increase of the negro race the offensive discrimination against the
North would be continually enlarging in its proportions. The
corrective provision in the Fourteenth Amendment was designed to
prevent this grave injustice both to the negro and to the white
man--but every Democrat in Congress and in the State Legislatures
voted against it through all the stages of its enactment and its
ratification, and thereby expressed a willingness to give an unfair
advantage to the Southern white man, and to establish an unfair
discrimination against the Northern white man.

Important and essential as are the provisions of the Fourteenth
Amendment just cited, indispensable as they have proved in the system
of Southern Reconstruction, they are relatively of small consequence
when compared with that great provision which is for all time:--that
provision which establishes American citizenship upon a permanent
foundation, which gives to the humblest man in the Republic ample
protection against any abridgment of his privileges and immunities by
State law, which secures to him and his descendants the equal
protection of the law in all that relates to his life, his liberty,
and his property. The first section of the Constitutional amendment
which includes these invaluable provisions is in fact a new charter
of liberty to the citizens of the United States; is the utter
destruction of the pestilent heresy of State-rights, which constantly
menaced the prosperity and even the existence of the Republic; and is
the formal bestowment of Nationality upon the wise Federal system
which was the outgrowth of our successful Revolution against Great
Britain.

Before the adoption of this Amendment citizenship of the United States
was inferred from citizenship of some one of the States, for there was
nothing in the Constitution defining or even implying National
citizenship as distinct from its origination in or derivation from a
State. It was declared in Article IV, Section 2, of the Federal
Constitution, that "Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all
the privileges and immunities of citizens in the several States;" but
nothing was better known than that this provision was a dead letter
from its very origin. A colored man who was a citizen of a Northern
State was certain to be placed under the surveillance of the police if
he ventured south of the Potomac or the Ohio, destined probably to be
sold into slavery under State law, or permitted as a special favor to
return at once to his home. A foreign-born citizen, with his
certificate of naturalization in his possession, had prior to the war
no guarantee or protection against any form of discrimination or
indignity, or even persecution, to which State law might subject him,
as has been painfully demonstrated at least twice in our history. But
this rank injustice and this hurtful inequality were removed by the
Fourteenth Amendment. Its opening section settled all conflicts and
contradiction on this question by a comprehensive declaration which
defined National citizenship and gave to it precedence of the
citizenship of a State. "_All persons born or naturalized in the
United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of
the United States and of the States wherein they reside_." These
pregnant words distinctly reversed the origin and character of
American citizenship. Instead of a man being a citizen of the United
States because he was a citizen of one of the States, he was now made
a citizen of any State in which he might choose to reside, because he
was antecedently a citizen of the United States.

The consequences that flowed from this radical change in the basis of
citizenship were numerous and weighty. Nor were those consequences
left subject to construction or speculation. They were incorporated
in the same section of the Amendment. The abuses which were formerly
heaped on the citizens of one State by the legislative and judicial
authority of another State were rendered thenceforth impossible. The
language of the Fourteenth Amendment is authoritative and mandatory:
"_No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the
privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall
any State deprive any person of life, liberty or property without due
process of law, nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the
equal protection of the laws_." Under the force of these weighty
inhibitions, the citizen of foreign birth cannot be persecuted by
discriminating statutes, nor can the citizen of dark complexion be
deprived of a single privilege or immunity which belong to the white
man. Nor can the Catholic, or the Protestant, or the Jew be placed
under ban or subjected to any deprivation of personal or religious
right. The provision is comprehensive and absolute, and sweeps away
at once every form of oppression and every denial of justice. It
abolishes _caste_ and enlarges the scope of human freedom. It
increases the power of the Republic to do equal and exact justice to
all its citizens, and curtails the power of the States to shelter the
wrong-doer or to authorize crime by a statute. To Congress is
committed the authority to enforce every provision of the Fourteenth
Amendment, and the humblest man who is denied the equal protection
of the laws of a State can have his wrongs redressed before the
Supreme Judiciary of the Nation.

It is perhaps not strange that the Democrats of the South were hostile
to the great results wrought for freedom, for justice, and for popular
rights by the Fourteenth Amendment. Their education, their prejudices,
their personal interests had all been in the opposite direction, and it
was doubtless too much to hope that all these would be overcome by a
victory for the Union--a victory which carried to their minds a sense
of personal humiliation and of remediless ruin. If their course was
unwise it is not altogether unintelligible. But the action of the
Northern Democrats cannot be accounted for and cannot be excused. They
stood stubbornly, solidly, without reason, without justification,
against a great enlargement of popular rights. It is a matter of
wonder that a political organization which claims Jefferson for its
founder and Jackson for its exemplar, should have surrendered to its
rival the sole glory of an achievement which may well be compared with
that increase of liberty attained by our ancestors, when the dependence
of Colonies was exchanged for the independence of States.