Source: Patriot Post | VIEW ORIGINAL POST ==>
Abraham Lincoln, while waging war to save the Union and attempting to plan for a reunion, had become the most activist president in our country’s history. He had leveraged the presidency into a position more powerful than Congress or the courts as he combined the roles of chief executive and commander-in-chief in a way that had not occurred in previous administrations. In reality, the United States Civil War was unlike previous conflicts with the Tripoli pirates, a second fight with Great Britain, and even the war with Mexico. And Lincoln responded with a leadership style that challenged previous perceptions of the office created by Article II of the U.S. Constitution.
As a constitutional scholar, I am torn between Lincoln’s courage and his total commitment to the country and his need to “lead” that led him to take huge steps that occasionally ignored constitutional restraints. I hear the phrase “slippery slope” in my ear, and yet Lincoln’s use of emergency powers and his ability to keep searching for the most skilled military commander — General Ulysses S. Grant — ultimately saved the United States, this great experiment in self-government. The toil showed in each personal photograph that chronicled his presidency. From a relatively youthful but serious president-elect to a worried, haggard-looking leader, Lincoln gave the presidency and this nation his total commitment.
On April 9, 1865, Generals Grant and Robert E. Lee met in Wilbur McLean’s parlor at Appomattox Courthouse and the nation’s long nightmare was ended. Historians calculate that more than 700,000 men had died in the war that stretched across five Aprils; thousands more would wear their wounds until their death years later.
Grant was generous in his terms of surrender. All Confederate officers and men were pardoned and were allowed to leave the battlefields with their personal property. That action alone — the right to return home with horses and mules to begin spring planting — was welcomed even if defeat was a painful tonic. Officers could retain their side arms and, even more important, the almost-starving Confederate soldiers would be given Union rations for their trips home. Even Grant’s kindness and extended olive branch could not erase the bitterness of defeat, but at least the open conflict would soon end as the word of surrender traveled across the battlefields to the west.
But celebration in the North was short-lived; only five days later, Abraham Lincoln was assassinated.
The plot to kill the president and key members of his administration did not succeed as the conspirators had planned, but the most significant blow had been struck. The president who had offered lenient conditions for reunification was dead, and the Radical Republicans in Congress would attempt to wrench control of Reconstruction from the inexperienced vice president, Tennessee’s Andrew Johnson, who had been in office less than a month. At the same time, the slain president would be hailed as a martyr to the Union and would become more “sainted” in remembrances than he would have approved.
While a search for John Wilkes Booth and his co-conspirators waged on, followed by a much-publicized trial and execution, the country strained to learn more about the new president — a man from a state that had seceded from the Union and joined the Confederate States of America. It was a strangely bizarre chapter in our history…
Lincoln had chosen Johnson as his 1864 vice-presidential running mate because he wanted — indeed, needed — a more moderate partner in ending the war and reunifying the nation. Johnson had served as a town alderman, mayor, and Tennessee Democratic U.S. senator who did not support secession and refused to leave his seat in Congress after his state withdrew from the Union. An heir to Andrew Jackson’s idea of the “common man” as “We the People,” Johnson believed that the South’s action was motivated by the greed of the elite Southern planter class and he became one of the strongest supporters of Lincoln in Congress. His argument that the Founders had designed to Union to be perpetual, a gift to be transmitted from one generation to the next, made him quite popular in Washington, DC, and a traitor in the South.
How would this untested man handle the challenges posed by the war’s end and Lincoln’s death?
Ah, the story gets interesting.
