The president was on the run. He hadn’t just gotten away; he had been evading his pursuers for some time. This man had been the president of the Confederacy, and now he was the most wanted man in the country, overseeing the few remaining people and things that belonged to the breakaway country. By this time, the Civil War had ended for all intents and purposes: there was no army under his control anymore, but there was a loyal group of men who were helping him live on the run. And there was no telling how long he would live this way. Whereas his soldiers had laid down their arms and many had already returned home to begin their post-war lives, this man had been fleeing for some time—perhaps because the consequences of his actions were outside his control and were no longer applied to his soldiers or even his top advisors; those consequences would flow directly to him now. There loomed the possibility that those in power in Washington would see to his imprisonment or even his execution. Confederate president Jefferson Davis could take heart, as a Mississippian, that perhaps President Andrew Johnson—a Tennessean—would see to those federals going easy on Davis, but that was just a hope, a wish. And that would only be a possibility if Davis was captured.
(more…)Tag: Civil War
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The Legacy of Robert E. Lee
No figures in American history earn universal admiration. As years—and generations—pass, legacies change. As morals, priorities, and political issues evolve, so do understandings of those people in the past who brought change—good, bad, or otherwise—to the country. For some figures, like Abraham Lincoln, whose authentic genius is admired generation after generation, their merit is questioned only by those who unreasonably say the great should have been greater. For others, it becomes much more varied and nuanced, and for Robert E. Lee, his legacy has always differed depending on the part of the country where his legacy is measured and the tenor of the moment. This is because, perhaps more than even Confederate President Jefferson Davis, Lee became a symbol of the Confederacy—with all its ills but also its potential for what might have been.
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The Legend of Winfield Scott Hancock
War heroes earn respect through their service. The Civil War brought out more heroes than perhaps any other war in American history. They were men who served their country at its inflection point, and they could be assured that their time on the battlefield could translate to time in public office. General Winfield Scott Hancock was but one example. He was “a patriotic hero, a stainless gentleman, and an honest man.”[i] He became one of the greatest Generals in the war: one that the soldiers, officers, and citizens were glad to have. He got out from under a famous name and created his own legacy, becoming a regular name in the wartime newspapers. But there was still a question of whether his post-war career would be as glamorous as his time during the war. Although he had a reputation for “honest heroism and personal character,” he was a Democrat; and at a time when Democrats simply could not expect to win the Presidency.[ii]
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The Rise of James Garfield
It was a time of oratory and a time when Ohioans became President. James Garfield was a product of the time. He was born into “a poor family” and “an intellectual in love with books.”[i] He attended the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute as a student and janitor, and by the following year, he became an assistant professor.[ii] Garfield was a man who treasured intellect. When William Dean Howells came to Garfield’s home in Hiram, Ohio in 1870, he sat on the porch and told a story about New England’s poets; Garfield “stopped him, ran out into his yard, and hallooed the neighbors sitting on their porches: ‘He’s telling about Holmes, and Longfellow, and Lowell, and Whittier.’”[iii] At a time when the Midwest fostered “a strong tradition of vernacular intellectualism” that manifested itself in “crowds for the touring lectures, the lyceums, and later the Chautauquas,” the neighbors gathered and listened “to Howells while the whippoorwills flew and sang in the evening air.”[iv]
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A Fee-Based Government
Rutherford B. Hayes, from the moment that he “won” the Election of 1876, had many opponents. And, because he believed that having opponents meant you must be doing something right, he relished the fight with his opposition. One issue that Hayes prioritized was reforming the fee-based governance system, the system that empowered government officials to use “fees, bounties, subsidies, and contracts with private individuals or corporations to enforce laws and implement public policy.”[i] With the federal government having significantly grown from the antebellum era, those officials had accrued and would continue to accrue power in novel ways. Reforming that system—if, in fact, Hayes sought to do that—would not be something he could have hoped to do during his time as President.
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Reconstruction
The years after the Civil War, until 1877, were replete with novel uncertainties. The country had changed: the qualities that defined antebellum America had vanished; those who had been the most vocal before the war—soon-to-be Confederates—had seen their soapbox taken by the “Radical Republicans,” Republicans who sought to not only end slavery but to bring into effect equality amongst the races. Regardless of political party or geographic location, the country and its citizens had the task of reconstructing the United States, every one of them, and that task began before the Civil War’s end. President Abraham Lincoln spoke of his hope to reconcile the “disorganized and discordant elements” of the country, and he said: “I presented a plan of re-construction (as the phrase goes) which, I promised, if adopted by any State, should be acceptable to, and sustained by, the Executive government of the nation. I distinctly stated that this was not the only plan which might possibly be acceptable.”[i] Lincoln died four days later without fully setting forth his vision for how the nation may reconstruct itself, but events would soon render that vision—broad and ambiguous as it was—antiquated: soon after his death, the same federal government that had grown to enjoy extraordinary power (such as suspending the writ of habeas corpus) would go from having an authentic political genius, Lincoln, at its helm to having Andrew Johnson, a disagreeable at best (belligerent at worst) as executive; and not so long after Johnson took power, roving bands of the Ku Klux Klan acted in concert with state officials throughout the South to subjugate—by any means—those who had been freed.
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The Election of 1876
In celebrating America’s first centennial, on July 4, 1876, one must have recalled the tumult of that century: a war to secure independence, a second war to defend newly-obtained independence, and then a civil war the consequences of which the country was still grappling with eleven years after its end. But there also had been extraordinary success in that century, albeit not without cost; by the 100-year mark, the country had shown itself and the world that its Constitution—that centerpiece of democracy—was holding strong (with 18 Presidents, 44 Congresses, and 43 Supreme Court justices already having served their government by that time), and the country had expanded several times over in geographic size, putting it in command of a wealth of resources as its cities, industries, and agriculture prospered. Several months after the centennial celebration was the next presidential election, and during the life of the country, while most elections had gone smoothly, some had not—the elections of 1800 and 1824 were resolved by the House of Representatives choosing the victor as no candidate secured a majority of Electoral College votes and the election of 1860 was soon followed by the secession of Southern states. And yet, even with those anomalous elections in view, the upcoming election of 1876 was to become one unlike any other in American history.
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The Nineteenth Century Liberal
The two dominant American political parties of the late 1860s, the Republicans and the Democrats, are the parties that continue to dominate the political landscape into the early Twenty-First Century. Although they are the same parties in name, many of the policies they espouse—and the place on the political spectrum their supporters find themselves—have almost entirely reversed in the intervening century and a half. In modern parlance, a liberal is one that finds himself or herself on the left side of the political spectrum and is more likely to be a member of the Democratic Party. In the late Nineteenth Century, the term had an entirely different meaning. (more…)
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The Election of 1868
In 1864, as the election neared, President Abraham Lincoln, a Republican, wagered that his re-election prospects depended on having a unity ticket: rather than choose a fellow Republican for the nomination for Vice President, he opted for a War Democrat and southerner, Andrew Johnson. With Johnson being from the South, condemning the Confederacy, and supporting the prosecution of the Civil War without negotiated peace—unlike the faction in his party known as the Copperheads (which called for immediate peace negotiations with the Confederacy)—he served as a useful balance to the Republican, Lincoln, whose party was increasingly vocal about abolition and subjugating the South, political issues that chilled some parts of the electorate to Lincoln. By 1868, much had changed. Lincoln had been assassinated, Johnson had poorly navigated Washington politics (and had come to within one vote of the Senate removing him from the presidency), and Ulysses S. Grant had continued his meteoric rise in popularity. There was little doubt that Grant would be the Republican nominee; he was one of the most popular Americans of the 1860s and would remain so for the duration of the 19th Century. The bigger questions were who the Democratic Party would choose as its nominee and whether that nominee would have a chance at becoming the first Democrat elected to the Presidency in twelve years—when James Buchanan won the election of 1856. (more…)
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A Nation Reborn
In the same way that the Second World War would reshape the globe in the Twentieth Century, the Civil War reshaped America for the remainder of the Nineteenth Century. Veterans of both wars came to define their respective generations and rise to positions of power: just as Union General Ulysses S. Grant’s meteoric rise culminated in him becoming President three years after the war, General Dwight D. Eisenhower would find himself being elected President seven years after the war of his generation. Lesser generals also worked their way into office—some of those offices being elected and others being executive offices of companies in the emerging industries following the wars—but that would occur over the course of decades: the last Civil War veteran to reach the presidency, William McKinley, occupied the White House as the Nineteenth Century faded into the Twentieth. As ever, those who held power determined the direction of the country’s future. In the weeks and months following the end of the Civil War, and President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, people in power would be sketching out the contours of a post-war America; and it was then, at that nascent stage of the newly reborn nation’s life, that new factions emerged—factions that would vie for weeks, months, and even years to cast the die of America in their own image and either keep, or make, the nation they wished to have.
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Last Best Hope of Earth 