The Arm-in-Arm Convention

the: arm-in-arm convention Thomas Wagstaff Seven thousand delegates and spectators, packed into a hastily constructed board "wigwam" on Philadelphia's Girard Avenue, shook the rickety structure with applause. James L. Orr, the massively framed governor of South Carolina, late senator in the Congress of the Confederate States of America, ostentatiously clasped the arm of Massachusetts ' short, stocky General Darius N. Couch; together they led the delegations of their respective states solemnly down the center aisle to their seats. When the wild cheering began to subside, General Richard Taylor, only a year before commander of the last Confederate army to surrender its arms, stood on his chair to send it roaring up afresh with a lusty cry for "three cheers for the thirty-six states of the Union." It was August 14, 1866. Alexander W. Randall, former War Governor of Wisconsin, rapped for order, using a gavel wrought from the timbers of the U.S.S. Constitution, "Old Ironsides." The "Arm-inArm Convention," the political culmination of Andrew Johnson's reconstruction policy, had begun.1 Organized by Johnson's Conservative Republican supporters in the North and the representatives of his restored governments in the South, the National Union movement that called the Philadelphia Convention aimed at the formation of a national political coalition that would control the congressional elections in 1866 and elect Johnson President in 1868.2 In 1864 the Republican party had retitled itself the Union party and successfully increased its influence among War Democrats and in the border slave states. The nomination of the nation's best known southern loyalist, Andrew Johnson, as Abraham Lincoln's running mate symbolized that purpose . Following Lincoln's assassination and the closing of the military phase of the Civil War, Johnson moved to perfect the political coalii Harper's Weekly, Sept. 1, 1866; New York Herald, Aug. 15, 1866; Richard Taylor, Destruction and Reconstruction, ed. by Richard B. Harwell (New York, 1955), pp. 310-311. 2 John and LaWanda Ck)X, Politics, Principle and Prejudice, 1865-1866 (New York, 1963), pp. 31-33, 46-47, strongly supports the view that Johnson attempted a reorganization of national political parties in 1865-1866. The same idea is considered, but rejected, by Eric L. McKitrick, Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction (Chicago, I960), pp. 13, 397-403. 101 102CIVIL WAR HISTORY tion that had won him the Vice-Presidency and to extend it into the defeated Confederacy. He hoped to bring the reconstructed South into the Union coalition, read the Radicals out of the Republican party and then merge its Conservative and Moderate wings with defecting sections of the Democratic party to form an unbeatable political combination .5 In the first six months of Johnson's administration the movement progressed rapidly. By the end of 1865 it had begun to achieve formal organization in the shape of Union-Johnson political clubs springing up throughout the country.4 Southern state governments had been reorganized under Johnson's sole influence. Full congressional delegations from every former Confederate state, including several would-be United States senators who had been hand-picked by Johnson, and all voicing full support for the President and his policies, stood ready to take their seats.5 The Radical counterattack mustering strength in Congress first to block the admittance of the southern representatives and to pass the Freedmen's and Civil Rights BiUs over Johnson's vetoes, then checked the momentum of the National Union movement. As the strength of the opposition increased, Johnson and his supporters concentrated their efforts on the crucial congressional elections to be held in the fall of 1866. Sometime early in June they decided to hold the National Union convention and to make it the focal point of their campaign. Shortly thereafter Secretary of State William H. Seward discussed the plans for the convention with Thurlow Weed, who in turn conferred 3 Edward Stanwood, A History of the Presidency (Boston, 1904), pp. 301304 ; William Best Hesseltine, Lincolns Phn of Reconstruction (Tuscaloosa, I960), passim, details Republican attempts to infiltrate the southern and border states during the war; Cordon S. P. Kleesburg, The Formation of the Republican Party as a National Organization (New York, 1911), p. 225; Cox, Politics, Principle and...