THE CIVIL WAR AND RECONSTRUCTION - 1865-1890
TOWARD BLACK SUFFRAGE
4.4: WOMEN AND THE AMENDMENT
Now, let me go back to the word "male" in Section 2. Advocates of women's rights were
outraged by inserting the word "male" into the Constitution here, and saying that
disenfranchising women doesn't cause any penalty to a state. The women's rights
movement, as we have said, sort of suspended operation during the Civil War to fight for
the Union and emancipation. But now, no less than blacks, they saw Reconstruction as a
period of transition, as Elizabeth Stanton said, from slavery to freedom and that women
should benefit from the rewriting of the Constitution. As Stanton said, quite rightly, you
don't open the constitutional door very often. She said, if we don't get our rights now,
half a century may pass before the constitutional door is open. And that is exactly what
happened, because it wasn't until 1920 until women got the right to vote. So, here was
the opportunity. The idea of equality has been galvanized by the Civil War. The
Constitution is being rewritten. And one of the most dramatic or poignant ways of
putting this came from Olympia Brown, another feminist. She said, we must sever
citizenship from the "accidents of the body," race and sex. Accidents of the body, which
should have no bearing on what the rights of people are as citizens. "Bury the black man
and the woman in the citizen," says Brown. Bury the black man and the women in the
citizen. They should all be equal citizens. And of course, suffrage would be the symbol
for both black men and all women, the symbol of citizenship. So, the feminist leaders -now, we're talking about a small movement. The feminist movement was very vocal,
very articulate, but was not a mass movement at this time. But they raised a big fuss
about the 14th Amendment and they had been long allied with the Radical Republicans,
and they saw the 14th Amendment as a betrayal by their former allies. Now, of course,
the Republicans in Congress said -- and even many male abolitionists -- the phrase
went, "This is the Negro's hour." This is the Negro's hour. This is the time to get the
rights for black men that had been denied them, and to add women's suffrage will derail
the whole thing, was their argument. But then, of course, the debate over women's
status goes further, because in a sense -- what we're seeing here is the intersection
between constitutional law and common law. The common law of coverture, I've
mentioned this before, puts women in subordinate status to their husbands or their
fathers. That's the common law. It's not even clear that constitution can really abrogate
that very easily, in a very enforceable way. But these women were also complaining, or
that is to say claiming, not only the right to vote, but the rights of free labor. Should not
the triumph of free labor apply to women? Many women had joined the wage labor force
during the Civil War. Why weren't women allowed the same opportunities to advance in
the free labor market that men did? Why weren't women allowed "economic
independence"? They should be allowed the same market opportunities as men enjoyed.
Now, the reality was very different, of course. Women occupied (who did work outside
the home) occupied very low wage economic categories. By far the largest job,
employment category, for women in the 19th century was domestic service. By far the
largest number of employed women worked in the homes of other women and men as
domestic workers, which was not a route to economic advancement. The wages were
extremely low and the conditions of work were very bad. But at the furthest edge of the
radical impulse among feminists at this moment were challenges to marriage itself,
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certainly demanding easier divorce. Marriage should be considered a contract which
either side can get out of, if they desire to do so. Divorce was very, very difficult in the
19th century. Many women were trapped in abusive and unhappy marriages. You had to
go to court and prove adultery on the part of your husband. Some states barely allowed
divorce at all. If there was a divorce, most of the states gave custody of children to the
husband, not the wife. And so, these groups are demanding more equitable divorce laws,
equitable division of property of a couple, things like that. "The same law of equality that
has revolutionized the state," says Elizabeth Cady Stanton, "is now knocking at the door
of our homes." Equality is knocking at the door of our homes. Some are demanding pay
for housework. I mentioned this, this in the 13th Amendment. If involuntary servitude is
being abolished, what about the work of women within the domestic sphere which is
uncompensated? Stanton then goes further and starts demanding access to birth control
for women. They didn't use that term then, but the right to regulate childbirth, which is
still a controversy, I mean, there's still people today who don't want women to have
that. So, they're very -- suddenly, the feminist movement has taken a very radical turn
in the aftermath of the Civil War. Here's an image of one of the more colorful feminists
of this time, Victoria Woodhull, speaking at a congressional hearing about women's
suffrage and sitting to her left, on the picture right, is Elizabeth Cady Stanton over on
the side. Victoria Woodhull, a very dramatic and fashionable and quite articulate
advocate of all sorts of things: suffrage, what she called "free love," that is, easy
marriage and divorce, etc. And she's there testifying in this. Woodhull became famous,
or notorious, soon afterwards, in the early 1870s, when she published a newspaper in
which she revealed the so-called Beecher-Tilton scandal, the greatest sex scandal of the
19th century where Henry Ward Beecher, the leading Protestant clergyman in the
country, was revealed by her to have been (how should we put this?) practicing Christian
love a little too literally with Elizabeth Tilton, one of his parishioners and the wife of a
major editor, Theodore Tilton, of a reform magazine. But of course, what happened then
was, respectable opinion went, you know, allied with Beecher and Woodhull was literally
driven out of the country. She moved to England where she married an English Earl and
did pretty well for herself. [laughter] But the point is, even as Stanton, Anthony, and
these others are speaking of liberalizing divorce, questioning some of the bases of the
marriage situation, in fact, as we said, former slaves are flocking to get married, and the
federal government is promoting marriage, and the Freedman's Bureau is promoting
marriage, and most white women do not see marriage as an abusive thing but as a
sacred covenant. You know, a sacrament. And so that movement, that impulse doesn't
get anywhere at this point. Most Republicans saw the end of slavery not as empowering
women, but as empowering men to occupy the (we said this a week ago) to occupy their
traditional role, which had been denied them, of you know, head of the household.
Restoring the freed people's manhood was central to the definition of freedom for both
black and white commentators at this time. So, the women's impulse, spurred by the
war and galvanized in Reconstruction, does not succeed. Women are not written in to
the right to vote when it comes, as we'll see in a minute, and divorce laws are not
revised. The end result of this, though, is a severing of the historic connection between
the women's movement in this country and the abolitionist tradition. And in a sense,
these women leaders basically conclude, you cannot trust men to advocate for women's
rights. And the result is the formation of independent women's organizations, severed
from the Radicals and severed from the abolitionists, which will lead the fight for
women's suffrage in the 1870s, '80s, '90s and into the 20th century. Severing them is a
plus in the sense that it leads to women's organizations run by women with women's
suffrage as the issue, not just one among many. But cutting loose from the egalitarian
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principles of the Radicals and the abolitionists removes a barrier, let's put it that way, to
the women's movement allying with other groups in the society. And so finally when, by
the turn of the century, the leading women's suffrage organization is very racist in many
of its ideas and outlook, because they're just looking for anyone who'll speak for
women's suffrage. It doesn't matter what their views are on anything else. That's a
whole other story. But the point is, even the Radicals, the abolitionists, in the eyes of
these feminists, fell far -- as Frances Gage says, "fell far short" of the true idea of
equality. And that's one of the limits of the egalitarian impulse in Reconstruction.
INTERVIEW: THE RECONSTRUCTION AMENDMENTS
When you think about this history of violence in Reconstruction era South, that there has
to be a distinction between the experience of men and the experience of women. And
we've talked about gender in the course in this, like, latter section of the course in sort
of high politics fashion, about the split between abolitionists and suffrage. But what
about on the ground? What does a gendered history of Reconstruction look like? >>
That is a subject which is -- >> Enormous, among other things. >> Well, I mean, it has
gotten a lot of attention lately. When I was writing my book in the 1980s, there was
very, very, little work on that subject. But since then, a lot has appeared. And most of it,
not all, by any means, but most of it is about African-American women and how
emancipation affected women sometimes in different ways than men; how the family
was reconstituted in freedom; how becoming members of a family in freedom changes
the dynamics within the family, because now you're under laws which assert the
privilege of the man. The common law, the statute law all insist that the man is the head
of the family and women basically are subsumed within that. And some women resented
this, of course. The older idea, which some scholars have put forward both for North and
South, that the experience of war itself helped to galvanize a kind of demand for greater
rights among women, particularly white women, doesn't seem to be emphasized very
much anymore. Both Nina Silber and Drew Faust, and their books on North and South,
argue that really women often wanted to go back to the more conventional gender roles
that they had been pushed out of, so to speak, by the war. Although, of course, unlike in
the South, the war does give rise to a very reinvigorated feminist movement and really
is the launching pad which will lead 50 years later (takes a long time) to the women's
suffrage amendment. But there's a continuous history from the Civil War era now to, you
know, to women's suffrage. So certainly some women were galvanized to go in that
direction. But I think, you know, what's interesting also, as you mentioned before, the
legal history of this era, and what happens to the law of the family, the law of gender
relations in the marketplace: not that much, at this moment. It will change slowly as the
19th century goes on. But, you know, even the resilience of coverture is very
remarkable. You know, one case, Supreme Court case I didn't mention in the lecture, the
Bradwell case, Bradwell v. Illinois, who was a woman who wanted to be a lawyer, Myra
Bradwell, and was barred from -- Illinois state law barred women from practicing law.
Only men could practice law. She went all the way up to the Supreme Court and said,
this is a violation of the 14th Amendment. Equal protection. I'm being denied my rights
as a laborer. Equal protection of the law. There's nothing in the 14th Amendment saying
women aren't entitled to it. Supreme Court rejected her claim. They said, this is not law.
This is nature. Women are just not suited to be lawyers, so this is not a discrimination. If
you're just reenacting the law of nature, so to speak, you're not discriminating against
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anyone. So, you know, women are not capable of practicing law. Somebody reading the
opinion said, well, men don't seem able to practice law properly either, if you read this
decision, you know. It's so illogical. But so the resilience of these older principles is very
remarkable, considering the radical changes that went on in this period. >> But this
raises the question of equal citizenship, which is something we talked about a lot in the
course with relation to the 14th Amendment, which of course does enshrine birthright
citizenship at the same time that it introduced these gendered exclusions into the
document, much to the outrage of this feminist movement that is recently defining itself
against, like, this former abolitionist moment in this period. So does it make sense then,
given this sort of simultaneous act of inclusion/exclusion, to think about the 14th
Amendment as, this like brief for equal citizenship? >> You know, I believe it is and I
think many scholars, including friends of mine, I won't mention their name, misinterpret
-- >> That might have gotten you in trouble recently. >> Yeah, most misinterpret the
14th Amendment. The inclusion of the word "male" is about one thing: voting, and
representation for voting, representation in Congress. It is discriminatory, obviously, and
the feminist movement was right to be outraged by introducing the word "male" into
that section. But it does not have any bearing on the other section of equal protection.
There was no gender difference in that. Privilege and immunities, equal protection, those
are for everybody. Now, of course, they're not implemented equally for everybody.
Women are still subject, as we said, to the discriminations of statute law, common law,
etc., and it takes a long, long, long time to eliminate that, and we still haven't totally
100%. But I think one has to distinguish these areas of equality. Voting is not, legally
speaking, a right of citizenship. It is a privilege of citizenship. Not every citizen has the
right to vote, yet that does not mean they are not a citizen, at least under the 14th
Amendment and under general discourse of the moment. So I'm not trying to claim that
Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumner -- well, Sumner would say he was a feminist,
and the feminists were pretty annoyed at him for going back on his principles. But most
Radical Republicans in Congress were not feminists. They didn't think they were
betraying anything. This is what they had tried to accomplish, equal rights for black
people, and they didn't see a gender discrimination as undercutting that. But I think the
critique of it by Stanton and Anthony and Woodhall and others was a very powerful
critique and did lead... So, I don't see the point of somehow (how should we put this?)
sort of choosing sides and saying, look how terrible the Radicals were, or look how
narrow-minded the women were. I think the point is to see the complexity of these
issues at a moment of radical change. >> On this issue of the 14th Amendment, though,
it seems like for contemporary audiences, like, the time that we hear about this is when
the Supreme Court, under the guise of corporate personhood, is expanding corporate
rights in some new direction. And this is something that happens a little bit after our
course comes to a close, but how does this happen, this transformation from the 14th
Amendment into this like weapon for the rise of the corporation? >> Well, you know,
they say the Supreme Court reads the election returns and the rise of the corporation
was pretty hard to ignore. And throughout our history, going back to John Marshall, you
know, the Supreme Court has always been very solicitous of economic development and
not wanting to stand in the way. >> You talked in class about this being, them being,
like, the force for conservatism built into the Constitution. >> But is it conservatism? In
this sense, they would say to themselves, no, we are actually the, we are looking for
innovation. >> The agents of this massive revolution, the rise of capitalism. >> Right.
We don't want to put the court in the way of radical economic change which is going on.
The notion of corporations as persons was not invented by the Supreme Court. It's an
old, old principle. The question is whether the 14th Amendment is meant to apply to
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them. Do they have the same rights as other kinds...? There are certain, obviously -- the
whole idea of a corporation, among other things, is that the guys who are running it
don't have to pay their bills. They don't have liability for, you know, the corporation has
personal liability, not the directors and all this. But the court, you know, the Republican
Party by the 1880s is more and more just intimately tied in with the interests of the
largest corporations in the country. The Democratic Party is not much different; it may
be dealing with some other different corporations, but this is the way politics is back
then. The Senate is the, you know, chamber of millionaires, like it is today, actually. So
one shouldn't maybe be surprised at how this influence exerts itself in politics. And
similarly, one can blame the Supreme Court (as I do, seriously) for a series of horrible
decisions vis-a-vis blacks in undercutting the Reconstruction amendments. And yet, if I
had Justice White here, he'd probably say, hey, this is what people want. This is what
voters want. We're just reflecting a general retreat. We're not inspiring retreat. We're
just reflecting what the general consensus in the North is about Reconstruction and black
rights. People are no longer willing to go down that road, so what are we supposed to
do? >> But on the judge today, someone like Justice Scalia would say that, I mean, this
all about original intent, right, that you were just reconstructing what the framers or, in
this case, what the people who were passing the 14th Amendment wanted. >> There is
not a scintilla of evidence, in my opinion, that anybody who was involved in drafting the
14th Amendment was thinking about corporations at all. This was not the issue facing
them. So I don't think original intent will get you very far when you are talking about
corporate personhood and the 14th Amendment. But, you know, justices, even Scalia,
who is a very coherent thinker, often contradict themselves. How can Scalia have -there's no way that Scalia actually with his principles could defend Bush v. Gore decision.
It was completely -- >> Like, he just doesn't want to talk about that-- >> Right. I know
they don't, but they did -- >> You get a bye on that one, you get a Mulligan. >> They
did put a guy into the White House, so, you know, that's not the way the court's
supposed to operate, but nonetheless, they did it.
4.5: THE ELECTION OF 1866
Well, okay, let's go back to the 14th Amendment. Congress passes it. It's got to go out
to three-quarters, it's got to be ratified by three-quarters of the states. The 14th
Amendment becomes the issue, you might say, in the congressional elections of 1866.
In that year, in that summer, fall, Andrew Johnson, unlike other presidents, takes a
leading role in supporting candidates, mostly Democrats, who are in favor of his
Reconstruction policy. He tries to form a new political coalition. He has something called
the National Union Convention. But very few Republicans are willing to go with him. Most
of the people now backing Johnson are Democrats, North and South. Johnson's effort to
mobilize support in the North is injured by riots, race riots that break out in the South in
the summer of 1866, leading to scores of deaths of African Americans, and of some
white people, too. In Memphis, there's the Memphis riot which leads to 50 deaths,
virtually all blacks, in a kind of an attack on black homes and black schools. Even worse,
the New Orleans riot in the summer of 1866. These are images of the New Orleans riot.
People, often police, shooting at black people. The inside of the convention hall. What
happened in New Orleans was, if you remember when I was talking about Louisiana in
the Civil War, the Reconstruction of Louisiana in the Civil War. They had this
constitutional convention, it abolished slavery, didn't give any rights to blacks, but it said
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it, it authorized the president of the convention to reconvene if desired. And in 1866,
with Confederates, basically in control of Louisiana, the old constitutional convention
tries to reconvene. And the meeting of that leads to a riot where armed whites are
assaulting the building, including the local police now allied with these, you know, exConfederates. And something like 40 people are killed, several hundred wounded. And
again, the image of the South in Northern eyes that these riots portray, is one -- you
know, that they are not willing to accept the results of the Civil War, that there is this
violence against African Americans. Local authorities are not willing to do anything about
it. The army has to be sent in to put down the violence. And these things really
undermine whatever support there was for Andrew Johnson's Reconstruction policy.
Johnson breaks with tradition and goes into the North campaigning for congressional
candidates who will support his policy. This is unprecedented. The so called "swing
around the circle." He travels all around the North, support -- But it turns into an utter
disaster. Johnson starts exchanging epithets with people in the audience. People yell
things out at him. He starts yelling curses back at them. [laughter] Bantering with the
crowd. He's not very dignified as a president, so to speak. He tells the Northern people
they're ignorant, they don't really know what's going on in Congress. He becomes more
and more self-pitying. He starts comparing himself with Jesus Christ, saying people
want kill -- he's willing to sacrifice himself for the nation. [laughter] And by the time the
swing around the circle is over, whatever support Johnson had has evaporated. Here's
an image of an anti-Johnson, here's an image of, someone wrote on a placard of
Johnson, you see, "I am king," and put a little crown on his head. This is a Democratic
cartoon. It's from the governor's election in California. This is the Republican candidate
for Governor, I believe. But this is overt use of racism in the campaign. It's kind of hard
to see. I think it's reproduced in my book, I can't remember. You've got the governor
and you've got a black -- this is negro suffrage and what's to come -- you've got the
governor, you've got a black guy, on top of him is a Chinese, on top of him is sort of a
Native American, you see, with an arrow. And then someone is bringing along a monkey,
saying, well, if these guys can vote, let's give monkeys the right to vote. So this is, you
see, the absolute overt racism as, you know, the critique of the Radical policy of black -black suffrage will lead to all these other disasters if followed. Well, the result of the
elections, of course, is that the Republicans sweep to way beyond two-thirds control of
both houses of Congress, rendering Johnson totally irrelevant. And this leaves the
question of the 14th Amendment up in the air, because to get three-quarters of the
states, some Southern states are going to have to ratify the 14th Amendment. There are
a few leading Southerners, one guy we'll talk about next week, James Alcorn, one of the
leading planters of Mississippi, says, you know, it looks like the Northern public actually
doesn't support Andrew Johnson, and we better really be prudent here. Why don't we
ratify the 14th Amendment. Because Congress had said, if the South ratifies the 14th
Amendment, Southern states, they can come back into the Union. And Alcorn says, let's
do that, we really have no alternative. But most Southern leaders say, absolutely not,
the 14th Amendment is a complete violation of all our liberties. And so, legislature after
legislature in the South rejects the 14th Amendment, by overwhelming majorities. In
the South Carolina legislature, only one member votes in favor of ratification. In
Georgia, only two. The whole South, only 20 or 30, where 700 or 800 legislators vote
against it. And they are egged on by Democrats in the North, and they're egged on by
Johnson. Johnson keeps saying, don't ratify the 14th Amendment, and they'll never
enact black suffrage. He keeps telling the South, don't worry, don't worry. Of course, it
happens, two months after he starts saying this, it does happen. And so he's completely
out of touch with political reality by this time.
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4.6: THE RECONSTRUCTION ACT OF 1867
So this situation cuts the ground out from under the moderate Republicans. Remember,
the moderate plan had always been to amend Johnson's Reconstruction by guaranteeing
the rights of the former slaves. Civil Rights Act, 14th Amendment, but keeping those
governments in place. But now the Johnson governments are seen to be completely
intransigent. They will not consider any effort to give protection to the former slaves.
And you know, so when Congress meets in December 1866 and then for a short session
into March 1867, the moderates basically decide there is no alternative but to go for
black male suffrage in the South, to get new governments. They finally decide, we've got
to get rid of these governments in the South set up by Andrew Johnson and set up new
ones based on male suffrage, non-racial male suffrage. Now this was not exactly what
the Radicals wanted. Stevens, again, is further ahead. Stevens just wants military rule of
the South. He said, there's violence, things are out of control. Long-term military rule
will create stability, will create time for people to kind of get used to the new situation,
and it will enable us to divide up the land of the leading planters among the blacks. But
Congress never approves that plan of Stevens' to redistribute land in the South. But, so,
the story is told in my book and I'm not going to just give all the details. But, you know,
in January, February 1867 a bill passes the House for military rule in the South. It goes
to the Senate. They put other things on. It goes back to the House. And eventually, they
pass this law, the Reconstruction Act of 1867, the pivotal law of this period, which
inaugurates what we call Congressional Reconstruction or Radical Reconstruction. It sets
the terms for Southern admission, readmission, and it divides the South temporarily into
five military districts. It says, no legal government exists in the South now, the military
is going to take over five districts, but it's not for long-term rule. The purpose of military
rule is to start registering voters to have elections, new elections, in the South. In those
elections, black men can vote. First time in American history that significant numbers of
black men will be allowed to vote. First experiment in interracial democracy in American
history. And at the same time (this is complicated and a lot of people don't understand
it) the people who are denied the right to hold office in the 14th Amendment cannot vote
in these new elections. Now, you'll read in the old thing, well, they disenfranchised all
the whites. They gave the right to vote to the blacks and -- No, that is not, this is not all
the whites. Nobody knew how many it was. It might've been 10,000 voters, 8,000
voters, there were estimates. But it was the old political leaders who, according to the
14th Amendment, cannot hold office, cannot vote in these new elections. The elections
are to elect constitutional conventions, which will write new constitutions for the
Southern states, which will include nondiscriminatory voting. They must also ratify the
14th Amendment. Once they do those two things, have new constitutions and ratify the
14th Amendment, Congress will readmit their delegates and they will be back as part of
the Union. The Reconstruction Act of 1867, like all the measures here, is a compromise.
It's much closer to the Radical position, because it has given black men the right to vote,
which is what the Radicals have demanded since the end of the Civil War. But it is not
for indefinite military rule. It's based on the idea of the states being quickly restored
back into the Union. And the South could choose not even to do this and just remain
under military rule. But no state decides they want to do that. So the radical part is
black suffrage. An amazing leap into the unknown. Today, well, the right to vote, you
know (of course, it's under attack in some places), but it's not so amazing. But at this
time, no country that abolished slavery so quickly tried to bring the former slaves into
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real positions of political power. Two years after the end of slavery. Even Haiti, where a
black revolution overturned slavery, was then ruled by a series of basically military
dictatorships for quite a while. In the British West Indies, you had to have so much
property to vote that the vast majority of the former slaves were disenfranchised. But
here we're talking about, in a political democracy, which is what the United States prides
itself on being, the former slaves, two years after the end of slavery, at least the male
ones, being brought in as equal participants in American democracy. Nobody knew what
the outcome would be. Would these former slaves be manipulated and controlled by
their former owners? Nobody knew. That's what Andrew Johnson had said. Would the
fact that they were economically dependent make it impossible for them to act
politically? Maybe because they were dependent on whites for their livelihood they could
not really mobilize themselves. Nobody knew. So it was a leap in the dark, and it came,
the black suffrage comes out of the impasse (that's what I said last time), it comes out
of the crisis itself. It comes out of the fact that the crisis created by Johnson's
intransigence and the failure of his Reconstruction plan and the inability to compromise,
pushes the great majority of the Republican party now into the Radical position. Maybe it
was doomed to fail at the beginning, who knows. In my book, I quote Senator Timothy
Howe of Wisconsin, this dramatic letter or wonderful quote where he said, we have
pulled up our anchor and "cast [it] out a hundred years" into the future. They have
jumped 100 years into the future, in 1867. That's exactly what it turned out to be. It
took 100 years for these rights to actually be guaranteed in this country in the 1960s.
And it took an entire new generation, obviously, and an entire new social movement and
new ideas, and a whole different world 100 years later, to finally implement, in part, the
agenda of Reconstruction. So it's certainly a remarkable moment in our history in this
country, and in the history of democracy.
4.7: IMPEACHMENT AND THE FIFTEENTH AMENDMENT
Now one of the oddities of the Reconstruction Act of 1867 is that it puts the
implementation of Reconstruction into the hands of the military. And who is the
commander-in-chief of the military? Andrew Johnson, who is completely opposed to this
policy and vows to obstruct it in every way he can. So that's kind of strange. Now,
Congress tries to work around this. They pass a law saying that all military orders must
be issued through the general-in-chief of the army. That's Ulysses S. Grant. Grant, by
the way, was a pretty shrewd political actor, although a lot of people don't realize it. He
had been cooperative with Johnson early on, and then when he saw which way the wind
was going, he shifted over to the Republican majority. But they figured that he can't get
rid of Grant. Grant is the preeminent hero coming out of the Civil War. So Johnson's
orders must go through Grant, and Grant, they think, will not allow orders that
undermine the Reconstruction plan. They also passed the so-called Tenure of Office Act,
which said that any presidential appointee who was approved by the Senate -- certain,
you know, certain judges and cabinet members, others, you know, their appointment
has to be approved or ratified with the advice and consent of the Senate. If they've been
approved by the Senate, they can't be removed without the Senate's approval. This is to
protect Secretary of War Stanton, a Radical who's still in Johnson's cabinet. And since
he's the secretary of war, he'll also have a say, obviously, in how Reconstruction is
implemented. So they're trying to work around. Now, the Radicals said, hey, let's just
get rid of Johnson, let's impeach him, this is ridiculous. He's a total pain in the neck, let's
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get rid of him. But you know, this gets to what is an impeachable offense, anyway? The
Constitution says the president or others may be impeached for "high crimes and
misdemeanors." But of course, it doesn't say what those are. What is a high crime and
misdemeanor? Well, Johnson, eventually Johnson is impeached of course, because after
several months he actually removes Stanton, the secretary of war, and appoints
someone else in his place, and that is a direct violation of the Tenure of Office Act. Now,
Johnson says, wait, that act's unconstitutional. But that's not for the president to decide
-- the courts. That comes in early 1868. But moderate Republicans are nervous or
reluctant about impeaching and removing Johnson. It's only when he directly violates a
law that has been passed, this Tenure of Office Act, that they finally go along with
impeaching him. What is an impeachable offense? If racism was, incompetence,
stupidity, just being totally annoying and impossible, they'd all have agreed to get rid of
Johnson. But those weren't crimes, you know? And even the violation of the Tenure of
Office Act, a lot of people said, hm, is that a high crime and misdemeanor? Hm, not so
clear. So Johnson is impeached in the House and goes on trial before the Senate. The
one of only two presidents who have been tried before the Senate (the other, of course,
being Bill Clinton) in a trial of impeachment, and he's acquitted, of course. It requires a
two-thirds vote. They came one vote short of convicting Johnson and removing him from
office, partly because his lawyer, William Evarts of New York, fundamentally made a deal
with some moderate Republicans, in which he said, look, I will promise you that if you
leave Johnson (and it's only, what? another year basically that he's going to be in office),
he will stop being a pest. He will not try to block Reconstruction. He will just stay out of
your way. And indeed, that's what happened. Johnson stopped being annoying and
obstructionist and just stayed there for a year. But they accepted this -- enough of them
who just didn't like the precedent of impeaching the president, enough of them voted for
acquittal that he was not removed from office. Now, when President Clinton was on trial,
I had a call from a very famous high-class journalist, Geraldo Rivera, you remember
him? [laughter] I did, I got a call from Geraldo. I was sitting in my office and he says,
Professor, I'd like to talk to you about impeachment and Johnson and Clinton. I said,
well, sure, what do you want to know? He said, well, I'd like you to come on my show. I
said, great. He said, well, now, here's the thing, I have a theory, I've uncovered
something that both of these impeachments were really about sex. I said, well, yeah,
that's true about Clinton, but Johnson? I've never heard about that, I've never seen any
documentary evidence. What are you talking about? He said, well, there was a... He
starts going on with this kind of crazy story about a woman. I don't know. I said, you
know, Geraldo, I think you should present this on TV. I don't think I want to actually get
involved in this, so I've missed my chance there. Another reason Johnson was acquitted
was: who would take Johnson's place were Johnson removed? There was no vice
president. Today, we have a procedure where the president -- if there's no vice
president, the president could appoint a vice president. When Nixon resigned to avoid
being tried for impeachment, and Gerald Ford became president, he then appointed a
vice president, who was, I guess, Rockefeller, right? Didn't he? Yeah. Now, Ford himself
had been appointed vice president, because Spiro Agnew, who'd been elected with
Nixon, had to resign because of corruption. So in 1975, '76 for the first and only time in
American history, we had a president and a vice president who nobody had voted for.
Nobody had cast a vote for either Ford or Rockefeller. Very weird situation. But they
didn't have that back then, so the next in line was the president pro tem of the Senate,
who was Senator Ben Wade of Ohio, who was a Radical. He was really radical. He was in
favor of women's suffrage. He had been giving speeches in 1867 saying that now that
the slavery issue is settled, the main question facing us is capital versus labor. In fact,
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here's a trivial question -- trivia question -- it may be trivial, too: Who was the only
American quoted in Volume 1 of Marx's Das Kapital, which appears right at this time?
Ben Wade. Marx liked Ben Wade's speech about the coming war between capital and
labor and mentioned it as a sign of the times in Kapital. But anyway, the members of the
Senate weren't so sure they wanted Ben Wade to become president, because he might
then get re-nominated and serve another four years. But anyway, of course, what
happens quickly is General Grant is nominated as the presidential candidate and goes on
to win election in 1868. This is the last time that race is really fundamental to the...
Let's see if I can find out where I am. Oh, here we go. This is a campaign ribbon for the
Democrats, Seymour of New York and Blair. "Our ticket." There they are, Seymour and
Blair. And here's the motto. See? "Our motto: This is a White Man's Country; Let White
Men Rule." 1868 is the last presidential election where racism is the explicit slogan, the
explicit policy of the Democratic Party. For reasons we'll see down the road, it will recede
in the 1870s. The final act, just take one more look, we're going to end in a minute, the
15th Amendment. With the election of Grant, Congress now tries to put AfricanAmerican male suffrage into the Constitution. The 15th Amendment is very brief
compared to the 14th Amendment, as you see. "The right...to vote shall not be...
abridged...on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude." Alright, now this
is not what the Radicals wanted. Radical influence is waning. The Radicals wanted an
affirmative, an affirmative amendment, saying something like "every male citizen age 21
or above has the right to vote." What's the difference between that and this? What's the
difference between saying every male citizen has the right to vote and saying you cannot
take the right to vote away because of race or color? This leaves open other ways of
taking away the right to vote that are not explicitly racial, and as we will see -- By the
way, this is going on today. States are passing laws, you got to have a state-issued ID
to vote, right? There's nothing about race there, they don't say anything about race. The
courts have upheld this. It's not a violation of the 15th Amendment, even though the
aim is to eliminate, basically, Hispanic and black voters in a lot of these states, or many
of them, particularly Hispanics, who may not have these kinds of documents. When the
right to vote is finally taken away, it will be by literacy tests, and poll taxes, and
understanding clauses, which are not racial on the face of it, even though they are
applied in a purely discriminatory manner. And of course, the women's rights movement
is disappointed with this, because it allows deprivation of the right to vote because of
sex. Sex is not in this, right? There's nothing in here that says a state can't take away
your right to vote or deny your right to vote because of sex or gender. So it's a weaker
amendment and it causes a lot of problems in the future. Nonetheless, this is the end or
the culmination of the constitutional revolution of Reconstruction, which has, as I said,
has really reshaped our Constitution. We're going to end, but I just want to show you
one other thing here. This is the Radical vision, and to some extent, it was enacted.
"Uncle Sam's Thanksgiving Dinner." It's hard to see, but this is a dinner with Uncle Sam
in there, and universal suffrage in the middle. There's blacks, there's Hispanics, there's
Chinese, there's a Native American. There are white people. This is the Radical vision of
a country of equality, regardless of race. And that was the hope, anyway, of
Reconstruction. Next week, we'll see how it actually worked out.
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