field day, depicting Johnson as inept, overly defensive, possibly drunk; rumors also surfaced that Grant's "disappearances" were due to his need to rendezvous with a bottle. The poet James Russell Lowell, writing in the
North American Review,
called the expedition "an indecent orgy" and described Johnson as a performing bear, clownish but excitable, being led about by his handlers. "It was a great blunder of [Secretary of State] Seward to allow [Johnson] to assume the apostolate of the new [Reconstruction] creed in person, for every word he has uttered must have convinced many ... that a doctrine could hardly be sound which had its origin and derives its power from a source so impure." Lowell judged correctly that a large part of the trouble with Johnson's effort to reach out to America was Johnson himself. He had little aptitude for seeking the middle ground; his character and lack of eloquence ill fitted him for promoting the theme of reconciliation; the public simply did not accept him as the successor to Abraham Lincoln. After all the pain and sacrifice of the recent national conflict, people expected something more.
Concern with the violence in New Orleans and the "unrepentant and still rebellious South," as well as President Johnson's flagging popularity, helped the Republicans sweep the November 1866 congressional elections, giving them the majority they would use to further defy the White House and take over the process of Reconstruction. On March 2, 1867,
Congress once again overrode a presidential veto to pass the first Reconstruction Act (there would be four by midsummer), which mandated that "whereas no legal state governments or adequate protection for life or property now exists in the rebel states," the region should be divided into five military districts, excluding Tennessee, which had already ratified the Fourteenth Amendment. Each of the other former Confederate states was required to ratify the amendment, with its guarantees of citizenship and equal rights, before they could be readmitted to the Union and their representatives welcomed in Congress. State constitutional conventions were called for, to create "a constitution of government in conformity with the Constitution of the United States in all respects, framed by a convention of delegates elected by the male citizens of said state, twenty-one years old and upward, of whatever race, color, or previous condition, who have been resident in the state for one year ... except such as may be disenfranchised for participation in the rebellion or for felony at common law." Such conventions, the act decreed, were to take place in the former rebel states of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Florida, Texas, and Arkansas; all constitutions emerging from these gatherings were to include the right of black suffrage and would be subject to congressional approval.
The Reconstruction Act provided for potentially momentous changes in the lives of African Americansâthe opportunity to vote as free men as well as the ability to serve as publicly elected officials. As scholars such as Steven Hahn have stressed, blacks, even as they emerged from slavery, tended to recognize the economic and political issues affecting their situation. But to better know their new rights, the use of the ballot box, and the functioning of a parliamentary democracy, many freedmen turned to the Union League. Begun in New York and Philadelphia during the war, league chapters in the postwar South worked to educate freedmen on the duties of citizenship, provided aid related to labor and land issues, and were strongly allied with Republican sentiments. Naturally, white Southerners distrusted the organization (they derided the chapters as "Loyal Leagues"), based on what the historian Thomas Holt has termed the "new massa" syndromeâthe conviction among whites that black people were incapable of independent thought, and that, in the absence
North American Review,
called the expedition "an indecent orgy" and described Johnson as a performing bear, clownish but excitable, being led about by his handlers. "It was a great blunder of [Secretary of State] Seward to allow [Johnson] to assume the apostolate of the new [Reconstruction] creed in person, for every word he has uttered must have convinced many ... that a doctrine could hardly be sound which had its origin and derives its power from a source so impure." Lowell judged correctly that a large part of the trouble with Johnson's effort to reach out to America was Johnson himself. He had little aptitude for seeking the middle ground; his character and lack of eloquence ill fitted him for promoting the theme of reconciliation; the public simply did not accept him as the successor to Abraham Lincoln. After all the pain and sacrifice of the recent national conflict, people expected something more.
Concern with the violence in New Orleans and the "unrepentant and still rebellious South," as well as President Johnson's flagging popularity, helped the Republicans sweep the November 1866 congressional elections, giving them the majority they would use to further defy the White House and take over the process of Reconstruction. On March 2, 1867,
Congress once again overrode a presidential veto to pass the first Reconstruction Act (there would be four by midsummer), which mandated that "whereas no legal state governments or adequate protection for life or property now exists in the rebel states," the region should be divided into five military districts, excluding Tennessee, which had already ratified the Fourteenth Amendment. Each of the other former Confederate states was required to ratify the amendment, with its guarantees of citizenship and equal rights, before they could be readmitted to the Union and their representatives welcomed in Congress. State constitutional conventions were called for, to create "a constitution of government in conformity with the Constitution of the United States in all respects, framed by a convention of delegates elected by the male citizens of said state, twenty-one years old and upward, of whatever race, color, or previous condition, who have been resident in the state for one year ... except such as may be disenfranchised for participation in the rebellion or for felony at common law." Such conventions, the act decreed, were to take place in the former rebel states of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Florida, Texas, and Arkansas; all constitutions emerging from these gatherings were to include the right of black suffrage and would be subject to congressional approval.
The Reconstruction Act provided for potentially momentous changes in the lives of African Americansâthe opportunity to vote as free men as well as the ability to serve as publicly elected officials. As scholars such as Steven Hahn have stressed, blacks, even as they emerged from slavery, tended to recognize the economic and political issues affecting their situation. But to better know their new rights, the use of the ballot box, and the functioning of a parliamentary democracy, many freedmen turned to the Union League. Begun in New York and Philadelphia during the war, league chapters in the postwar South worked to educate freedmen on the duties of citizenship, provided aid related to labor and land issues, and were strongly allied with Republican sentiments. Naturally, white Southerners distrusted the organization (they derided the chapters as "Loyal Leagues"), based on what the historian Thomas Holt has termed the "new massa" syndromeâthe conviction among whites that black people were incapable of independent thought, and that, in the absence
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