Jack of Harts

The administration Democrat President Johnson inherited after Republican President Lincoln’s assassination was aggressive in the form of Reconstruction it wanted to pursue. The Republicans wanted to erase Slavery and replace it with a true Free Society forever divorced from the one that came before. Johnson wished a far more modest Reconstruction that would allow the Southern States to map their own futures, and further wished to reshape his administration in his image. So the Republicans passed a law that forbade him from removing anyone the President and the Senate had placed in position without first asking the Senate to agree. When President Johnson dismissed Secretary of War Stanton in a direct challenge to the law they had passed over his veto, the House of Representatives voted to Impeach him. The Senate failed to convict him by one vote, and he remained in office until the end of the term he and Lincoln had been elected to, but his political star had been brought low. Even the Democrats did not want him, and the election of 1868 proceeded on without him.

The assassination of President Abraham Lincoln changed everything for Reconstruction in the Southern States. He had run the 1864 election with a unity government made up of Republicans and Northern Democrats in an attempt to make the Civil War less of a Republican versus Democrat conflict. Democrat Vice President Andrew Johnson spoke of hanging Confederates while part of the unity government, but as President he sought a much softer Reconstruction. Few Confederate leaders were imprisoned, none were tried for treason, and only one was executed for war crimes. He did not stop the Southern Black Codes that turned the freedmen into second class citizens, unable to own property, do business, or even walk around in public spaces like a normal man, and he blocked many laws the Republican Congress tried to pass. That was poorly received by Republicans, who fought the election of 1866 with a plan to change everything.

The Texas government called on their armies to stand fast and hold the line after General Lee surrendered. They maintained that the revolutionary cause was not yet lost, and their generals continued to exhort the men to train and protect the borders. They were still engaging major Union threats a month later, but the common soldier knew they were being fed a load of bull. And if anybody knew what bull looked like, it was a native Texan. The standard conscripted soldier saw no need to fight to the bitter end over a cause that was obviously lost and went home, often after “stocking up” on some last minute provisions from the nearest army depot. The vast Texas army literally just went home and a mere two thousand Union soldiers landed in Galveston a month later to take possession of a State that was offering no organized resistance. And the Texas governor who had ordered the soldiers to fight to the bitter end fled south of the border with the last of his sycophants. So the Civil War ended in Texas.