Impeached: The Trial of President Andrew Johnson and the Fight for Lincoln's Legacy by David O. Stewart

compel me to say that it was murder.” A day later, Sheridan’s feelings were stronger: “It was not a riot; it was an absolute massacre.”
    A few Johnson loyalists tried to blame the Radicals for the violence, but most Northerners laid the responsibility at the president’s feet. One Republican reported that after Memphis and New Orleans, Americans began to ask, “‘Does this mean that the rebellion is to begin again?’” A Radical congressman wrote in a magazine article that the president “has thrown himself into the arms of the South.” By some measures, some former slaves were beginning to make progress. In May 1866, the Freedmen’s Bureau reported more than seventy schools in Texas were teaching the children of freedmen and were wholly self-sustaining. Many Northerners came to the South to teach those children. Yet the same report found that when federal troops withdrew from an area, violence against blacks increased.
    Through the early months of 1866, as Johnson’s missteps and Southern violence shifted public opinion to favor Congress, the Joint Committee turned again to the nascent Fourteenth Amendment. After Charles Sumner’s insistence on Negro suffrage torpedoed Stevens’s simple proposal to fix the three-fifths rule, the panel confronted at least seventy proposed versions. Pressure built for the amendment to address many issues in addition to congressional representation.
    Once more, the scene shifted to Thad Stevens’s parlor on South B Street, behind the Capitol Building. Early one morning, Mrs. Smith opened the door for Robert Dale Owen, the idealistic son of Robert Owen, the Scottish visionary who had founded the utopian community of New Harmony, Indiana. As chair of a wartime commission on the freed slaves, Robert Dale Owen authored a report that inspired the founding of the Freedmen’s Bureau. Now, in late March 1866, he had an idea for breaking the impasse over the Fourteenth Amendment.
    Seated in Stevens’s parlor, with bearskins on the floor and panther skins on the walls, Owen outlined a draft amendment that blended several elements and took a gradual approach. After ten years, racial discrimination in voting or civil rights would be banned; until then, persons who were barred from voting in a state because of their race could not be counted in the allocation of congressional representatives among the states. The Owen draft also proposed to bar repayment of debts incurred by the Confederate states. “Read that to me again,” Stevens said. After chewing the matter over, he was sold.
    “We’ve had nothing as good as this, or as complete,” he pronounced. “It would be likely to pass, too; that’s the best of it. We haven’t a majority, either in our committee or in Congress, for immediate [Negro] suffrage.” He promised to put Owen’s draft before the Joint Committee. Owen had less luck with Fessenden of Maine, the Joint Committee chairman, who heard him out silently. John Bingham’s reaction was more positive.
    During the first half of April, the Joint Committee worked over Owen’s proposal, finally approving a version of it and adding Bingham’s pet language that the states must provide to their citizens “due process of law” and “equal protection of the laws.” By imposing those requirements directly on the states, Bingham’s provision could work a fundamental shift in power between the federal and state governments. Both Congress and federal courts could enforce those guarantees against the states. The traditional principle of state sovereignty, which had encouraged secession and which still inspired Andrew Johnson’s policies, would be reduced, limited by federal protection for individual rights.
    The Joint Committee did not release the proposed amendment for several weeks because Fessenden fell ill. In the interim, political resistance mounted to Negro suffrage—even Negro suffrage that would be delayed for ten years—and the Joint Committee dropped that