EACH day the conflict waxed warmer between the President and the Commoner.
The first bill sent to the White House to Africanise the "conquered provinces" the President vetoed in a message of such logic, dignity, and power, the old leader found to his amazement it was impossible to rally the two-thirds majority to pass it over his head.
At first, all had gone as planned. Lynch and Howle brought to him a report on "Southern Atrocities," secured through the councils of the secret oath-bound Union League, which had destroyed the impression of General Grant's words and prepared his followers for blind submission to his Committee.
Yet the rally of a group of men in defence of the Constitution had given the President unexpected strength.
Stoneman saw that he must hold his hand on the throat of the South and fight another campaign. Howle and Lynch furnished the publication committee of the Union League the matter, and they printed four million five hundred thousand pamphlets on "Southern Atrocities."
The Northern states were hostile to Negro suffrage, the first step of his revolutionary programme, and not a dozen men in Congress had yet dared to favour it. Ohio, Michigan, New York, and Kansas had rejected it by overwhelming majorities. But he could appeal to their passions and prejudices against the "Barbarism" of the South. It would work like magic. When he had the South where he wanted it, he would turn and ram Negro suffrage and Negro equality down the throats of the reluctant North.
His energies were now bent to prevent any effective legislation in Congress until his strength should be omnipotent.
A cloud disturbed the sky for a moment in the Senate. John Sherman, of Ohio, began to loom on the horizon as a constructive statesman, and without consulting him was quietly forcing over Sumner's classic oratory a Reconstruction Bill restoring the Southern states to the Union on the basis of Lincoln's plan, with no provision for interference with the suffrage. It had gone to its last reading, and the final vote was pending.
The house was in session at 3 a. m., waiting in feverish anxiety the outcome of this struggle in the Senate.
Old Stoneman was in his seat, fast asleep from the exhaustion of an unbroken session of forty hours. His meals he had sent to his desk from the Capitol restaurant. He was seventy-four years old and not in good health, yet his energy was tireless, his resources inexhaustible, and his audacity matchless.
Sunset Cox, the wag of the House, an opponent but personal friend of the old Commoner, passing his seat and seeing the great head sunk on his breast in sleep, laughed softly and said:
"Mr. Speaker!"
The presiding officer recognised the young Democrat with a nod of answering humour and responded:
"The gentleman from New York."
"I move you, sir," said Cox, "that, in view of the advanced age and eminent services of the distinguished gentleman from Pennsylvania, the Sergeant-at-Arms be instructed to furnish him with enough poker-chips to last till morning!"
The scattered members who were awake roared with laughter, the Speaker pounded furiously with his gavel, the sleepy little pages jumped up, rubbing their eyes, and ran here and there answering imaginary calls, and the whole House waked to its usual noise and confusion.
The old man raised his massive head and looked to the door leading toward the Senate just as Sumner rushed through. He had slept for a moment, but his keen intellect had taken up the fight at precisely the point at which he left it.
Sumner approached his desk rapidly, leaned over, and reported his defeat and Sherman's triumph.
"For God's sake throttle this measure in the House or we are ruined!" he exclaimed.
"Don't be alarmed" replied the cynic. "I'll be here with stronger weapons than articulated wind."
"You have not a moment to lose. The bill is on its way to the Speaker's desk, and Sherman's men are going to force its passage to-night."
The Senator returned to the other end of the Capitol wrapped in the mantle of his outraged dignity, and in thirty minutes the bill was defeated, and the House adjourned.
As the old Commoner hobbled through the door, his crooked cane thumping the marble floor, Sumner seized and pressed his hand:
"How did you do it?"
Stoneman's huge jaws snapped together and his lower lip protruded:
"I sent for Cox and summoned the leader of the Democrats. I told them if they would join with me and defeat this bill, I'd give them a better one the next session. And I will—Negro suffrage! The gudgeons swallowed it whole!"
Sumner lifted his eyebrows and wrapped his cloak a little closer.
The great Commoner laughed, as he departed:
"He is yet too good for this world, but he'll forget it before we're done this fight."
On the steps a beggar asked him for a night's lodging, and he tossed him a gold eagle. ······· The North, which had rejected Negro suffrage for itself with scorn, answered Stoneman's fierce appeal to their passions against the South, and sent him a delegation of radicals eager to do his will.
So fierce had waxed the combat between the President and Congress that the very existence of Stanton's prisoners languishing in jail was forgotten, and the Secretary of War himself became a football to be kicked back and forth in this conflict of giants. The fact that Andrew Johnson was from Tennessee, and had been an old-line Democrat before his election as a Unionist with Lincoln, was now a fatal weakness in his position. Under Stoneman's assaults he became at once an executive without a party, and every word of amnesty and pardon he proclaimed for the South in accordance with Lincoln's plan was denounced as the act of a renegade courting the favour of traitors and rebels.
Stanton remained in his cabinet against his wishes to insult and defy him, and Stoneman, quick to see the way by which the President of the Nation could be degraded and made ridiculous, introduced a bill depriving him of the power to remove his own cabinet officers. The act was not only meant to degrade the President; it was a trap set for his ruin. The penalties were so fixed that its violation would give specific ground for his trial, impeachment, and removal from office.
Again Stoneman passed his first act to reduce the "conquered provinces" of the South to Negro rule.
President Johnson vetoed it with a message of such logic in defence of the constitutional rights of the states that it failed by one vote to find the two-thirds majority needed to become a law without his approval.
The old Commoner's eyes froze into two dagger-points of icy light when this vote was announced.
With fury he cursed the President, but above all he cursed the men of his own party who had faltered.
As he fumbled his big hands nervously, he growled:
"If I only had five men of genuine courage in Congress, I'd hang the man at the other end of the Avenue from the porch of the White House! But I haven't got them—cowards, dastards, dolts, and snivelling fools"
His decision was instantly made. He would expel enough Democrats from the Senate and the House to place his two-thirds majority beyond question. The name of the President never passed his lips. He referred to him always, even in public debate, as "the man at the other end of the Avenue," or "the former Governor of Tennessee who once threatened rebels—the late lamented Andrew Johnson, of blessed memory."
He ordered the expulsion of the new member of the House from Indiana, Daniel W. Voorhees, and the new Senator from New Jersey, John P. Stockton. This would give him a majority of two-thirds composed of men who would obey his word without a question.
Voorhees heard of the edict with indignant wrath. He had met Stoneman in the lobbies, where he was often the centre of admiring groups of friends. His wit and audacity, and, above all, his brutal frankness, had won the admiration of the "Tall Sycamore of the Wabash." He could not believe such a man would be a party to a palpable fraud. He appealed to him personally:
"Look here, Stoneman," the young orator cried with wrath, "I appeal to your sense of honour and decency. My credentials have been accepted by your own committee, and my seat been awarded me. My majority is unquestioned. This is a high-handed outrage. You cannot permit this crime."
The old man thrust his deformed foot out before him, struck it meditatively with his cane, and, looking Voorhees straight in the eye, boldly said:
"There's nothing the matter with your majority, young man. I've no doubt it's all right. Unfortunately, you are a Democrat, and happen to be the odd man in the way of the two-thirds majority on which the supremacy of my party depends. You will have to go. Come back some other time." And he did.
In the Senate there was a hitch. When the vote was taken on the expulsion of Stockton, to the amazement of the leader it was a tie.
He hobbled into the Senate Chamber, with the steel point of his cane ringing on the marble flags as though he were thrusting it through the vitals of the weakling who had sneaked and hedged and trimmed at the crucial moment.
He met Howle at the door.
"What's the matter in there?" he asked.
"They're trying to compromise."
"Compromise the Devil of American politics," he muttered. "But how did the vote fail—it was all fixed before the roll-call?"
"Morrill, of Maine, has trouble with his conscience! He is paired not to vote on this question with Stockton's colleague, who is sick in Trenton. His 'honour' is involved, and he refuses to break his word."
"I see," said Stoneman, pulling his bristling brows down until his eyes were two beads of white light gleaming through them. "Tell Wade to summon every member of the party in his room immediately and hold the Senate in session."
When the group of Senators crowded into the Vice-president's room, the old man faced them leaning on his cane and delivered an address of five minutes they never forgot.
His speech had a nameless fascination. The man himself with his elemental passions was a wonder. He left on public record no speech worth reading, and yet these powerful men shrank under his glance. As the nostrils of his big three-angled nose dilated, the scream of an eagle rang in his voice, his huge ugly hand held the crook of his cane with the clutch of a tiger, his tongue flew with the hiss of an adder, and his big deformed foot seemed to grip the floor as the claw of a beast.
"The life of a political party, gentlemen," he growled in conclusion, "is maintained by a scheme of subterfuges in which the moral law cuts no figure. As your leader, I know but one law—success. The world is full of fools who must have toys with which to play. A belief in politics is the favourite delusion of shallow American minds. But you and I have no delusions. Your life depends on this vote. If any man thinks the abstraction called 'honour' is involved, let him choose between his honour and his life! I call no names. This issue must be settled now before the Senate adjourns. There can be no to-morrow. It is life or death. Let the roll be called again immediately."
The grave Senators resumed their seats, and Wade, the acting Vice-president, again put the question of Stockton's expulsion.
The member from New England sat pale and trembling in his soul the anguish of the mortal combat between his Puritan conscience, the iron heritage of centuries, and the order of his captain.
When the clerk of the Senate called his name, still the battle raged. He sat in silence, the whiteness of death about his lips, while the clerk at a signal from the Chair paused.
And then a scene the like of which was never known in American history! August Senators crowded around his desk, begging, shouting, imploring, and demanding that a fellow Senator break his solemn word of honour!
For a moment pandemonium reigned.
"Vote! Vote! Call his name again!" they shouted.
High above all rang the voice of Charles Sumner leading the wild chorus, crying:
"Vote! Vote! Vote!"
The galleries hissed and cheered—the cheers at last drowning every hiss.
Stoneman pushed his way among the mob which surrounded the badgered Puritan as he attempted to retreat into the cloak-room.
"Will you vote?" he hissed, his eyes flashing poison.
"My conscience will not permit it," he faltered.
"To hell with your conscience!" the old leader thundered. "Go back to your seat, ask the clerk to call your name, and vote, or by the living God I'll read you out of the party to-night and brand you a snivelling coward, a copperhead, a renegade, and traitor!"
Trembling from head to foot, he staggered back to his seat, the cold sweat standing in beads on his forehead, and gasped:
"Call my name!"
The shrill voice of the clerk rang out in the stillness like; the peal of a trumpet:
"Mr. Morrill!"
And the deed was done.
A cheer burst from his colleagues, and the roll-call proceeded.
When Stockton's name was reached, he sprang to his feet, voted for himself, and made a second tie!
With blank faces they turned to the leader, who ordered Charles Sumner to move that the Senator from New Jersey be not allowed to answer his name on an issue involving his own seat.
It was carried. Again the roll was called, and Stockton expelled by a majority of one.
In the moment of ominous silence which followed, a yellow woman of sleek animal beauty leaned far over the gallery rail and laughed aloud.
The passage of each act of the Revolutionary programme over the veto of the President was now but a matter of form. The act to degrade his office by forcing him to keep a cabinet officer who daily insulted him, the Civil Rights Bill, and the Freedman's Bureau Bill followed in rapid succession.
Stoneman's crowning Reconstruction Act was passed, two years after the war had closed, shattering the Union again into fragments, blotting the names of ten great Southern states from its roll, and dividing their territory into five Military Districts under the control of belted satraps.
When this measure was vetoed by the President, it came accompanied by a message whose words will be forever etched in fire on the darkest page of the Nation's life.
Amid hisses, curses, jeers, and cat-calls, the Clerk of the House read its burning words:
"The power thus given to the commanding officer over the people of each district is that of an absolute monarch. His mere will is to take the place of law. He may make a criminal code of his own; he can make it as bloody as any recorded in history, or he can reserve the privilege of acting on the impulse of his private passions in each case that arises.
"Here is a bill of attainder against nine millions of people at once. It is based upon an accusation so vague as to be scarcely intelligible, and found to be true upon no credible evidence. Not one of the nine millions was heard in his own defense. The representatives even of the doomed parties were excluded from all participation in the trial. The conviction is to be followed by the most ignominious punishment ever inflicted on large masses of men. It disfranchises them by hundreds of thousands and degrades them all—even those who are admitted to be guiltless—from the rank of freemen to the condition of slaves.
"Such power has not been wielded by any monarch in England for more than five hundred years, and in all that time no people who speak the English tongue have borne such servitude."