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'I am opposed to consolidation or to the concentration of power in the hands of the few.' 1

Thus his proposed constitutional amendments further to democratize the Government through the voting of presidential electors by districts instead of by States, for the popular election of Senators, and for definite long-time terms for Justices of the Supreme Court. Thus, a radical in his democracy, he had nothing in common with the forces soon to take possession of the Government. Nor was this devotion to the masses a demagogic simulation. One who knew him well and spared not his faults has recorded that 'his sympathies were easily stirred by rags in distress.'' Nor, despite the popular clamor raised against him, did he ever lose faith in the people. 'Cherish always the support of the common people,' he advised young Benton McMillin, just entering public life. 'I have found them a never-failing or faltering element of strength.' 3

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It was in keeping with this feeling for the plain people that he fought his long-drawn stubborn battle for his homestead law providing one hundred and sixty acres to every head of a family who would migrate to the public domain and cultivate the soil. To this, despite discouragement and defeat, he clung with a passionate tenacity because he knew the misery of the homeless wanderer and something of the longing for one's own vine and fig-tree. The moment he accumulated a little money, he bought a hundred acres of farm land.

There was something of the social revolutionist in this man's temper. He bitterly resented the enormous landholdings of the aristocracy while thousands of industrious men were unable to own the roof above their heads. 'I am no agrarian,' he once said, 'but if through an iniquitous system a vast amount of land has been accumulated in the hands of one man ... then that result is wrong. '4 Blaine thought his resentment against land monopoly amounted to hatred. He denounced the landed aristocracy as 'in

1 Moore, Life and Speeches, 484.
'Told the author by Governor McMillin.
'Address at Nashville, October 24, 1864.

2 Marse Henry, 1, 152.

flated and heartless,' and warned of such agrarian struggles as in Ireland.1 His congressional speeches, however, were sane and forceful. Did some one say it was impossible to give public land away? 'If you can grant your public lands as gratuities,' he replied, 'to men who go out and fight the battles of the country . . . is it not passing strange that you cannot grant land to those who till the soil and make provision to sustain your army?' 2 More: 'Do you want cities to take control of the government?' Are not the 'rural population, the mechanics... the very salt of it?' Yes, 'they constitute the mud sills.' This fight for free lands in the unpopulated territories of the West was strongly opposed by the pro-slavery element as tending to the ultimate loss of congressional power, and from this time on Johnson was looked upon as a renegade to the South. And yet there is no evidence on which to justify the bizarre theory that he was aiming at slavery. Disliking it, not on moral but on economic grounds, ever and anon in the bitterness of debate this hostility would flash forth in a biting phrase; but we shall see that he was not interested in the emancipation of slaves. He accepted the institution as established.

VI

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There was no justification for the Southern theory that Johnson would interfere with slavery through congressional action. 'My position,' he declared in the Senate, 'is that Congress has no power to interfere with... slavery; that it is an institution local in its character and peculiar to the States where it exists, and no other power has the right to control it.' He had no sympathy with the programme or methods of the abolitionists. 'He always scouted the idea that slavery was the cause of our trouble [the war] or that emancipation could ever be tolerated without immediate colonization,' wrote Julian, the abolitionist. 'At heart a hater of abolitionism.'5 Speaking in the Senate at the time of the John Brown raid, he excoriated those who stirred up sectional strife, to the peril of the Union, on the slave question. 'John Brown stands before the country as a murderer,' he said. "The time has arrived when these things ought to be stopped; when 2 Moore, Life and Speeches, 24.

1 Blaine, II, 5. * June 5, 1860.

Recollections, 243.

3 Ibid., 35.

encroachments on the institutions of the South ought to cease; . . . when the Southern States and their institutions should be let alone;... when you must either preserve the Constitution or you must destroy this Union.' John Brown compared to Christ? What blasphemy! 'I once heard it said that fanaticism always ends in heaven or in hell . . . I believe it true.' John Brown a god? 'Those may make him a god who will, and worship him who can - he is not my god and I shall not worship at his shrine.' 2

Fighting desperately as the war clouds lowered for the Union he loved and the Constitution he revered, he was not concerned with slavery. "The constitutional guarantees must be carried out!' he thundered. And then, turning to agitators of the slavery question, he continued: 'We do not intend that you shall drive us out of this house that was reared by the hands of our fathers. It is our house... the constitutional house.' Having thus defied the disunionists of the North, he turned to those of the South. 'Are we going to desert that noble and patriotic band who have stood by us in the North?' he asked. Lincoln elected? Ah, 'a minority President by nearly a million votes; but had the election taken place upon the plan proposed in my amendment to the Constitution by districts, he would have been this day defeated.' Run away because Lincoln enters? 'I voted against him; I spoke against him; I spent my money to defeat him; but still I love my country; I love the Constitution: I intend to insist upon its guarantees. There and there alone I intend to plant myself, with the confident hope and belief that if the Union remains together, in less than four years the now triumphant party will be overthrown.' 3

With the war clouds thickening a month before Lincoln's inauguration, Johnson still stood in the Senate passionately fighting for the Union and against the radicals on both sides the line. "There are politicians,' he said, 'who want to break up the Union to promote their personal aggrandizement; some desire the Union destroyed that slavery may be extinguished.' He, instead, would 'wrest it from the Philistines, save the country, and hand it down to our children as it has been handed down to us.' And

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then, an impassioned denunciation of the abolitionists. "Thank God I am not in alliance with Giddings, with Phillips, with Garrison, and the long list of those who are engaged in the work of destruction, and in violating the Constitution of the United States.' Never to the hour of the Emancipation Proclamation had Johnson sanctioned any interference with slavery. His plan to throw the Western country open to settlement would have strengthened the congressional forces against slavery — but he was thinking of the benefits to the poor whites. When he favored the admission of California with slavery he was not seeking to serve that institution - but to open more opportunities to the homeless whites.2 Thus he voted against Southern sentiment for the admission of Oregon -but he was thinking of homesteads and not of slavery.

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Yet he disliked the institution, and, like Lincoln, hoped for its extinction through colonization. Thus he spoke in favor of the admission of Texas. To increase the slave dominion? No; because Texas would 'prove to be the gateway out of which the sable sons of Africa are to pass from bondage to freedom.' He disliked slavery because of its degrading effect on white labor - always he was thinking of that. Thus, speaking of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, he declared that 'the emancipation of the slaves will break down an odious and dangerous aristocracy,' and 'free more whites than blacks in Tennessee.'

Nor can it be charged that he changed his views as to the purpose of the war when he took issue with the Radicals on the spirit of reconstruction. Scarcely had the war begun, when Johnson, in the Senate, proposed resolutions setting forth the spirit and purpose as he saw it. The war should be prosecuted in no spirit of oppression, nor for any purpose of conquest or subjugation, nor purpose of overthrowing or interfering with the rights or established institutions of those States, but to defend and maintain the supremacy of the Constitution and all laws made in pursuance thereof.' And there was another clause which foreshadowed his own policy of restoration - the purpose was to 'preserve the

1 Congressional Globe, February 5, 6, 1861.

Ibid., House, June 5, 1850.

Ibid., House, January 21, 1845.

Union with all the dignity, equality, and rights of the several States unimpaired.' 1

Thus, like Lincoln, he did not like slavery; like Lincoln, he recognized the constitutional rights of slavery; like Lincoln, he did not care for the abolitionists; like Lincoln, he was more interested in the preservation of the Union, with or without slavery; and like Lincoln, he thought the war was waged for the preservation of the Union and for no other purpose.

VII

In the misrepresentation of Johnson during the contests of his life, he was accused of being a Catholic in some quarters, an atheist in others, and he was neither. He affiliated with no church, but he put his belief on record: 'So far as the doctrines of the Bible are concerned, or the great scheme of salvation, as founded and taught and practiced by Jesus Christ, I never did entertain a solitary doubt.' It is probable that in his earlier life he was restrained from affiliating with a church because of the discriminations he found there between the rich and the poor. He was temperamentally incapable of submitting to such discrimination in the house of God. At times he disclosed a certain partiality to Catholicism, and this has been ascribed to his admiration of its policy of recognizing no distinctions in worship. Not only did he occasionally attend Catholic services in Washington, but he entered one of his sons in a Catholic school.

This contributed less, however, to the charge that he was, in spirit, a Catholic than his robust battles against Know-Nothingism and the religious intolerance of his times. He had been attacked on the false ground that he had put his daughter in a Catholic school in Georgetown. She had really attended Mrs. English's Seminary for Young Ladies, which was non-sectarian. But Johnson was intolerant of intolerance. He was as firmly convinced as Jefferson of the injustice and tyranny of any sort of interference with the freedom of conscience. On one occasion in the House, when a speaker had given utterance to a proscriptive thought, Johnson had flamed with wrath. 'Are the bloodhounds of proscription and persecution to be let loose on the Irish? Is the Congressional Globe, Senate, July 26, 1861.

2 Winston, 40.

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