Freedom by the Sword - US Army Center Of Military History

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Freedom by the Sword: The U.S. Colored Troops, 1862–1867
crat from the mountains of eastern Tennessee and wartime military governor of
the state, Johnson had seemed a good choice for Lincoln’s running mate on the
National Union ticket, a Republican Party surrogate, the previous year. When the
nominating convention met in June 1864, Northern newspapers had been printing
long casualty lists from Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s Virginia Campaign for a month
and Sherman’s attempt to seize Atlanta was still far from achieving a result. The
administration needed every vote it could get, so the Tennessean replaced Vice
President Hannibal Hamlin, a Republican from Maine, on the ticket. The election
of Lincoln and Johnson and Lincoln’s assassination in April 1865 put Johnson in
a position to reconstruct the conquered South by himself, without congressional
interference, for nearly eight months. 6
The new president embodied an observation expressed by many federal officers
during the war and after, that a staunch Southern Unionist was not necessarily
an abolitionist, or even well intentioned toward black people. Having risen
from poverty himself, Johnson as an elected official represented the interests of
the white residents of the poorest section of his state. As a candidate for the vice
presidency in October 1864, he had told an audience of black Tennesseans, “I will
indeed be your Moses, and lead you through the Red Sea of war and bondage, to
a fairer future of liberty and peace.” Yet nearly sixteen months later—ten of them
spent as president following Lincoln’s assassination—after meeting a delegation
headed by the black abolitionist Frederick Douglass, he told his secretary, “I know
that d——d Douglass; he’s just like any nigger, and he would sooner cut a white
man’s throat as not.” In the fall of 1865, a captain of the 40th USCI serving as
Freedmen’s Bureau agent at Knoxville reported his inability to accomplish much
among “a people so hostile to the negroe as are the East Tennesseans.” The new
president was true to the type. 7
Johnson’s first weeks in office confused onlookers. Late in April, he disowned
the too-lenient surrender agreement General Sherman had offered to Confederate
troops in North Carolina and sent Grant south to impose more stringent terms.
Southerners, black and white, awaited the president’s next move with anxiety.
Then, on 29 May, Johnson issued an amnesty proclamation and announced a plan
to install state governments throughout the former Confederacy. The amnesty
terms were generous, exempting only certain categories of persons, among them
the Confederacy’s highest-ranking officials, civil and military officers of the federal
government who had embraced the Confederate cause, and owners of more
than twenty thousand dollars’ worth of property. Such persons could apply to the
president for individual pardon. In a second proclamation that day, Johnson appointed
a provisional governor for North Carolina, whose duty it would be to summon
a convention to draft a new state constitution that would repudiate secession
1866, 107th USCI; all in Entry 57C, Regimental Papers, Record Group (RG) 94, NA. On the 59th
USCI at Brice’s Crossroads and Tupelo, see above, Chapter 7; on the reputation of the 81st USCI,
see above, Chapter 13.
6 Foner, Reconstruction, pp. 43–45, 176–84, 228.
7 David W. Bowen, Andrew Johnson and the Negro (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press,
1989), pp. 6 (“I know”), 51, 81 (“I will”); Capt D. Boyd to Capt W. T. Clarke, 5 Oct 1865 (B–136),
NA Microfilm Pub T142, Selected Rcds of the Tennessee Field Office of the Bureau of Refugees,
Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands (BRFAL), roll 25.