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Afterword
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178 Afterword Late in the afternoon of March 3, 1869 – the day before Ulysses S. Grant’s inauguration as president – Gideon Welles left his office at the Navy Department for the final time. He and Seward were the only cabinet officers to have served from the start of Lincoln’s administration through the end of Andrew Johnson’s. He apparently departed with few regrets. In his April 17th diary entry he admitted missing “the daily routine which has become habitual,” but he declared that the “relief from many perplexities more than counterbalances it.” He then proceeded to sum up his years as secretary of the navy in a passage combining pride in his achievements with a characteristic bit of Wellesian pessimism (or “realism,” as he probably would have preferred to call it): My duties were faithfully discharged and they have passed into history. I look back upon the eight years of my Washington official life with satisfaction and with a feeling that I have served my country well. My ambition has been gratified, and with it a consciousness that the labors I have performed, the anxieties I have experienced , the achievements I have been instrumental in originating and bringing to glorious results, and the great events connected with them will soon pass in a degree from remembrance or be only slightly recollected. Transient are the deeds of men, and often sadly perverted and misunderstood. Whatever satisfaction Welles felt, he had more cause for it during his first four years in office than during the second four. After the Confederacy ’s surrender, his main task was to convert the large wartime naval force he had worked so hard to create into a much smaller peacetime force. This meant cutting the number of ships from well over 600 to about 100, sharply reducing the number of active-duty officers and men, shrinking Afterword 179 the civilian work force at the navy yards, and reorganizing and consolidating the various squadrons.1 While Welles carried out this task with his usual dispatch, successful demobilization could not have been half as gratifying as meeting the challenges of mobilization when the nation’s very existence was at stake. During the Johnson years, Welles was deeply troubled by the triumph of what he viewed as Radical Reconstruction, but that many modern-day historians believe is more accurately termed Congressional Reconstruction .2 He opposed every Reconstruction measure the Republican majority in Congress adopted during Johnson’s term of office, including the Freedmen ’s Bureau Act, the Civil Rights Act, and the proposed 14th Amendment to the Constitution in 1866 and a series of Military Reconstruction Acts in 1867 and 1868. All of these were enacted over presidential vetoes, except for the 14th Amendment, which did not require Johnson’s signature before being sent to the states for ratification, but which he urged the states to reject. Although he confided doubts about Johnson’s political judgment to his diary, no member of the cabinet was stauncher than Welles in supporting the president’s vetoes and his opposition to the 14th Amendment . True to his bedrock belief in states’ rights and his fear of centralized government power, Welles regarded all of the Reconstruction laws as unconstitutional federal intrusions into matters falling exclusively within the states’ jurisdiction.3 And he opposed the 14th Amendment because he thought it would upset the balance between state and federal authority, skewing it toward the latter, and also because he regarded it as wrong for Congress to propose altering the Constitution when the former rebel states remained unrepresented in both the Senate and the House.4 1 Welles discussed these changes in his annual report of December 1865. 2 Since the late 1950s, a wealth of historical scholarship has fundamentally revised the extremely negative traditional view of Reconstruction, demonstrating, among numerous other important findings, that its radicalism had been exaggerated by earlier writers and that Republican moderates played a key role in shaping Reconstruction measures. Classic examples of such scholarship are Eric McKitrick, Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), John Hope Franklin, Reconstruction After the Civil War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), Kenneth Stampp, The Era of Reconstruction (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965) and Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988). 3 According to Welles’s March 22, 1866, diary entry, for example, he had urged the president to veto the Civil Rights bill because it “breaks down all barriers to protect the...