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92 Chap ter ten Reconstruction The Lines Are Drawn We have with us the widowed and orphaned ones of this war. We have with us an army of maimed heroes who are condemned, but wrecks of their former selves, to walk the earth in sadness and sorrow all their after lives. We remember that it was by this great affliction that the country was saved—that they unflinchingly stood in the breach between the Republic and her foes, and we will be true to them. —Ross, speech to the United States Senate, December 20, 1866| The problems of Reconstruction were unprecedented in United States history. There was no model to follow, and the solutions, in general, of Radical Republicans and the southern-born Democratic president differed greatly. By the middle of 1866 Radicals generally believed that seceded states should at least ratify the Fourteenth Amendment and extend full rights of citizenship to former slaves, including the right to vote, and that confiscated plantations should be subdivided into farms for freedmen. Radicals were not inclined to be magnanimous with southern rebels: their approach to Reconstruction could sound a lot like revenge. Edmund Ross’s December 20 speech, his first as a senator, expressed the sentiments of those Republicans who were not willing to accept southern representation in the Senate without specific concessions. Ross, who was one of few senators who actually had experienced combat in the war, spoke on behalf of Civil War veterans. “We who have stood shoulder to shoulder in the battle’s red front, where the fires of carnage lighted the souls of brave comrades to death and immortality, will not now insult the cherished names of the dead; will not falsify the issues upon which we have fought and conquered in this war; will not now blacken the record of devotion to our Reconstruction = 93 country and to liberty which has been signalized upon a thousand battlefields by honoring treason and exalting traitors.”1 Ross also gave credit to Unionist southerners who had resisted secession and had, in fact, served their country well under difficult circumstances . He expressed the grief that many people still felt over the loss of President Lincoln at the hands of an assassin who was widely viewed as an agent of southern rebels. “We have not forgotten our murdered President— we have not forgotten our martyred comrades, starved in the loathsome pens of Libby, of Andersonville, of Saulsbury, and of Belle Isle. We have not forgotten those faithful spirits who piloted our escaped prisoners through dreary nights of wandering in southern swamps and forests, who fed and secreted them from their blood-hound pursuers, and then paid the penalty with their lives. We have not forgotten those unconquerable southern loyalists who braved persecution and death to signalize their love for the old flag and their faith in the ultimate triumph of the cause which it symbolized.”2 Andrew Johnson was a rigid Jacksonian Democrat, not the compromiser his predecessor had been. At the same time, the Radical wing of the Republican Party was just as inflexible and difficult. The just society that white supremacist Johnson knew included blacks who were subservient. In 1865, in a conversation with Senator John Conness of California, he offered the opinion that he had never been opposed to slavery, and that, in fact, he believed blacks to be happier as slaves or in some similar role and that it was important that only white men manage the South.3 After a contentious meeting in the White House with Frederick Douglass and several other black leaders, the angry president blurted: “Those d——d sons of b——s thought they had me in a trap! I know that d——d Douglass; he’s just like any other nigger, and he would sooner cut a white man’s throat than not.”4 It would seem that Johnson came to accept the end of slavery only with reluctance. Radical Republicans, on the other hand, wanted immediate fundamental change in the South. Slavery was now dead, but that was not nearly enough for Radicals who, it would seem, could not see that changing fundamental attitudes and traditional ways of life was going to take generations , nor that this was not going to happen simply by changing laws or even amending the Constitution. Johnson’s 1866 message to Congress, the equivalent of the modern State of the Union address, was sent in written form and then read aloud in both houses. Johnson used the...

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