Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [397]
The people receive the rebels better than we expected, but the reason is that they believe Johnson is going to put them in their old masters’ power again, and they feel that they must conciliate or be crushed. They no longer pray for the President—our President, as they used to call Lincoln—in the church. They keep an ominous silence and are very sad and troubled.52
For black spokesmen, the President’s decision to pursue a “moderate” reconstruction plan, permitting the white South to reconstruct herself without black participation, prompted an initial disappointment that soon gave way to disbelief. What blacks had viewed (on Johnson’s assurance) as an “experimental” policy, designed to test white loyalty and intentions, turned into a nightmare of repression, Black Codes, and unequal justice. But rather than give up the “experiment” as a failure, which black leaders had confidently expected, the President insisted that the new state governments be legitimized. And blacks were left to contemplate still again the betrayal of their expectations by a man they had only recently praised so unrestrainedly. “Johnson has sold us,” Frederick Douglass wrote the publisher of the New Orleans Tribune in October 1865, but it remained for Congress “to pass upon the bargain.” Two months later, as Congress prepared to convene, the Tribune voiced the now deepening black disillusionment with the President’s policies. The editor urged Congress to assume control of reconstruction, to make “no compromises with a conservative and exclusively white-man loving administration,” and to hold the President to his initial commitments. If treason were to be made “infamous,” as Johnson had so often promised, the mode of punishment would have to be severer than the rapidly accumulating stack of executive pardons of former Confederate leaders suggested.53
The President’s response to a delegation of black leaders in February 1866 did little to reassure the few blacks who still retained faith in him. At this none too harmonious exchange of views in the White House, Johnson introduced himself as “a friend of humanity, and especially the friend of the colored man.” He offered once again, if they wished, to serve as their Moses to lead them from bondage to freedom. But he made it clear that he would not lead them to the ballot box, for that would only endanger their freedom and invite race war. Reaffirming his belief in government by consent of the governed, he interpreted that principle to mean that the white people in each state should determine the question of black suffrage. The President pointedly ignored the delegate who asked him if he would apply the principle of majority rule to states like South Carolina, where blacks comprised a majority of the population. Nor did he take kindly to Frederick Douglass’ argument that blacks needed the vote to protect themselves from the already rampant violence which the President thought would be unleashed in the event of black suffrage. As the exchange became increasingly acrimonious, both sides thought it best to terminate the meeting, and Douglass told his fellow delegates: “The President sends us to the people, and we go to the people.” After the “darkey delegation” left, President Johnson reportedly turned to a private secretary and exclaimed, “Those damned sons of bitches thought they had me in a trap! I know that damned Douglass; he’s just like any nigger, and he would sooner cut a white man’s throat than not.” Whether the President actually made that remark, he proceeded to act in its spirit.54
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