The Clansman
BOOK II
THE REVOLUTION
CHAPTER VII
A WOMAN LAUGHS
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 tomorrow. 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.”
When the last jeering cat-call which greeted this message of the
Chief Magistrate had died away on the floor and in the galleries, old
Stoneman rose, with a smile playing about his grim mouth, and
introduced his bill to impeach the President of the United States and
remove him from office.