Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [396]
To black spokesmen who had been openly critical of President Lincoln’s reconstruction and amnesty programs, and to those who had repressed their misgivings, the significance of the assassination seemed abundantly clear. The President had been victimized by his own magnanimity. His confidence in southern redemption and repentance had been rewarded with an assassin’s bullet. The New Orleans Tribune, which had been highly critical of the President, used the assassination to demonstrate that the nation’s enemies had not yet been vanquished.
Abraham Lincoln, the honest, the good, the religious man, who did not understand—be it said to his honor and glory—duplicity and trickery, believed in the protestations and solemn oaths of rebels. He was too confident, too lenient, and too mild. He was repaid with a pistol’s bullet. He did not know—as we do—what chivalry is.
Upon hearing of the assassination, black clergymen attending a conference of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Baltimore reacted in virtually the same manner, praising Lincoln’s good works, forgiving his sins (“His errors were errors of the head, not of the heart”), and, most importantly, urging “a sterner course” and the application of “more rigid principles” toward the defeated South. If the American people heeded the obvious lesson of this event, black spokesmen declared, they would realize soon enough that most white Southerners remained “incorrigible rebels” who willingly and deceitfully took the oath of allegiance to recover their property and political power; the Rebels expected to win at the ballot box what they had lost on the battlefield, and President Lincoln had been naïve enough to believe their protestations of loyalty. Fortunately, his successor knew better. The future lay in good hands, most of these same black spokesmen agreed, for the new President understood “Southern pretenses and Southern excesses” from his own experience and he would now do his duty. “Agag is to be hewn into pieces,” a confident black cleric proclaimed, “and Samuel must come forward and wield the sword of destruction—that man is Andrew Johnson.”50
Despite the grievous loss of Lincoln, then, black spokesmen were almost unanimous in their belief that Providence had chosen “a second Moses” to guide them to “the land of promise.” None other than Andrew Johnson himself made that solemn pledge, in addressing the black people of Nashville: “Humble and unworthy as I am, if no other better shall be found, I will be your Moses, and lead you through the Red Sea of War and Bondage to a fairer future of Liberty and Peace.” The New Orleans Tribune, with its own radical notions of reconstruction, thought well enough of the new President to predict that his previously expressed hostility to concentrations of political and economic power in the South presaged a vigorous policy of land confiscation and redistribution. Like Lincoln, Johnson was perceived as a man who exemplified the genius of democratic institutions, having risen from a humble station to the highest office in the land. He had proven his loyalty to the Union, and surely no man who had suffered “the malignity of the Rebels,” as had Johnson, would seek to restore those “traitors” to power. Where Lincoln had equivocated, Johnson could be expected to be decisive. Where Lincoln had been overly magnanimous in his treatment of the ex-Confederates, Johnson, who knew these people far more intimately, would be firm and unyielding.51
The assessment of Johnson’s personality traits proved accurate enough, but blacks had badly misjudged his politics and racial views. In upholding the principles of white supremacy, in expediting the pardon of ex-Confederate leaders, in seeking to restore political and economic power to the old ruling class, President