President Johnson's Plan

During that period (June to December), Johnson's provisional governors had been diligent in carrying out his plan of reorganization before Congress should meet, and, possibly, interfere with it. Before the first of December five of the disorganized States had ratified the XIIIth amendment of the Constitution, cited on page 1703. They had, also, caused the formation of constitutions for their respective States and the election of representatives in the National Congress. The President had hurried on his work, by directing the provisional governors to resign their powers into the hands of others who had been elected under the new constitutions. Some of these governors-elect had been active participants in the insurrection; and some of the Congressmen-elect in these States had been, it was said, active workers against the Government. These facts greatly disturbed the loyal people. They had witnessed with great anxiety the evident usurpations of power by the President, the exercise of which, as he had done, belonged exclusively to the functions of the representatives of the people in Congress assembled. The prescriptions of the Constitution are clear on that point. Yet the people waited patiently for the meeting of Congress in December, with the quieting knowledge that a majority of loyal men would be there, and that each House had the right to judge of the qualifications of its own members. It was a settled belief that disloyal men would not be allowed to enter either House over the bar of a test-oath prescribed by law, passed on the 22d of July, 1862. That law required every member to make oath that he had not "voluntarily borne arms against the United States since he had been a citizen thereof," or "voluntarily given aid, countenance, counsel or encouragement to persons engaged in hostilities thereto," and had never "yielded voluntary support to any pretended government, authority, power, or constitution within the United States, hostile or inimical thereto."

The subject of reorganization was among the first business of the Thirty-ninth Congress which assembled on the 4th of December, 1865. On the first day of the session, by a vote of 133 against 36, Congress agreed to a joint resolution to appoint a joint committee to be composed of nine members of the House and six of the Senate, to "inquire into the condition of the States which formed the so-called Confederate States of America, and report whether they, or any of them, are entitled to be represented in either House of Congress, with leave to report at any time, by bill or otherwise; and until such report shall have been made and finally acted upon by Congress, no member shall be received in either House from any of the so-called Confederate States; and all papers relating to the representatives of the said States, shall be referred to the said committee." This body was known by the misnamed "Reconstruction Committee." It should have been "Reorganization Committee."

This action of Congress was a virtual condemnation of the President's usurpations. It was a legitimate interference of the representatives of the people with his chosen policy of reorganization, and he was highly offended. He soon manifested open and violent hostility to the legislative branch of the Government, and maintained that position during the whole of his administration. In a speech to the populace of the capital on the 22d of February, 1866--a speech which every good American would gladly blot from memory and from the records of our country, if possible--the President, evidently under the malign influence of an unfortunate habit, forgetting the dignity of his station, and insensible to the gravity of the question at issue, actually denounced by name leading members of Congress, and the Republican party which had given him their generous confidence. In that speech he used slang phrases in speaking of public men, such as "dead duck," and exhibited a recklessness of assertion which no sober statesman would have uttered. The American people felt humiliated by this exhibition of the weakness of their Chief Magistrate.

But this exhibition was a small matter compared with what occurred later in the year (August and September, 1866) when the President and a part of his cabinet, with the pretext of honoring the memory of Senator Douglas by being present at the dedication of a monument to his memory erected at Chicago, on the 6th of September, made a political tour by a circuitous way through several States, to that city and beyond. He harangued the people by the way, in language utterly unbecoming the Chief Magistrate of a nation, and attempted to sow the dangerous seeds of sedition, by denouncing Congress as an illegal body because some of the disorganized States were not represented in it; declaring that it deserved no respect from the people, and that a majority of the members were traitors, "trying to break up the Government." That journey of the President, so disgraceful in all its features--its low partisan object, its immoral performances, and its pitiful results--forms a dismal paragraph in the history of the Republic.