losing the peace

Front matter

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Preface

Congressional Reconstruction, we now know, was a dismal failure.t In the North, racism and lack of commitment to sweeping reforms, whether social or economic, brought about a retreat from the moral fervor of the early 1860’s and an abandonment of attempts to rebuild the South. And with retreat in the North came the collapse of Reconstruction in the former Confederate states—for reform of the South seemed impossible without sustained Congressional intervention. One need only look at the record. Abandonment of Southern Republicans by Northern party leaders led to the

1See, for example, Harold M. Hyman (ed.), New Frontiers of the American Reconstruction (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1966), especially the essays by John Hope Franklin and C. Vann Woodward. The theme of uncertain northern commitment is also central to Kenneth M. Stampp’s The Era of Reconstruction 1865-1877 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965). It received perhaps its most eloquent formulation in C. Vann

Woodward's “Reconstruction and Revision,” an address before a General Session of the Southern Historical Association at Atlanta, November 8, 1967.

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M4 Bt9 vi Preface downfall of that party in the South and to subsequent Democratic “redemption” of the region. And the Democrats rejected all that Reconstruction had implied. Having acquiesced in freedom for the Negro, they relegated him to virtual economic bondage. Having courted his vote during the Reconstruction years, they disfranchised him when it suited their partisan purposes. Having accepted the results of the Civil War in good faith and having sworn evermore to uphold the Union, they resurrected Confederate generals and Rebel politicians as United States Senators and state governors. So complete was the wreckage of social and economic reconstruction under the restored Democratic governments that the task remained to be begun anew in the twentieth century.

Because the ultimate result of Reconstruction was failure, we have come to assume that failure was inevitable. And surely it seems that in Georgia, if anywhere in the conquered South, failure could scarcely have been avoided. The most recalcitrant of the Southern states, the only one to undergo two military reconstructions, and the last to be readmitted to the Union, Georgia had more than her share of unrepentent rebels. Only constant vigilance by Congress, so the implication is, could have kept this state squarely on the road toward reform and reconstruction.

Yet in Georgia, I think, failure was not inevitable. For there was in Georgia during Reconstruction a very real prospect of a Republican party which would have united a natural majority of the state’s voters, which would have sustained itself whatever the vacillations of the national Congress, and which would have embarked on a program of economic and social development for the state similar to that advanced by Henry Grady in the 1880’s and urged by Atlanta businessmen in the twentieth century. That such a party did not materialize in Georgia during the early months of Con-

Preface vii gressional Reconstruction may be blamed on Georgia Republicans’ misplaced reliance on Congressional support. That efforts to develop such a coalition failed in 1870 may be laid to the stigma of corruption and Negro rule which by then had become attached to all Southern Republicans.

Georgia Republicans, I suggest, were confronted with clear alternatives of strategy and tactics as they began the process of party-building shortly after the passage of the first Military Reconstruction Act in March, 1867. The choices the party leaders made, and the effect those choices had on the development of a Republican organization in Georgia, are the subjects of this book. Georgia Republicans doomed themselves to destruction, and the end result in Georgia, as elsewhere in the South, was failure. But, because it might have been otherwise, it was a failure whose importance for Georgia went far beyond the mere unseating of a single, short-lived, unpopular, state administration.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Members of the staffs of the Georgia Department of Archives and History, the Atlanta Historical Society, the Georgia State Library, Emory University, the University of Georgia, Duke University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Virginia, the Library of Congress, the National Archives, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the Massachusetts Historical Society, and Widener Library of Harvard University have been unfailingly kind and efficient in the face of what must often have seemed excessive demands on their time and skills. At the Johns Hopkins University Library, Miss Margaret Lough, Miss Ethel De- Muth, Miss Adelaide Eisenhart, and Mrs. Ione B. Hoover were especially generous with their help.

Rose, Joel R. Williamson, and Charles Wynes, who guided me to materials I had overlooked or who offered ideas or suggestions, I am deeply grateful. I am particularly indebted to Professor C. Vann Woodward for his careful reading of an earlier version of this manuscript and for his consistent encouragement and support. The members of my dissertation committee at the Johns Hopkins University, Professors Stephen E. Ambrose and Harold M. Hyman, and my dissertation director, Professor David Donald, all gave the original manuscript a close reading and made dozens of suggestions for improvements in style and content.

Permission to examine a group of Joseph E. Brown Papers still in private possession was granted me during the summer of 1964. Only the wish of those who hold the papers to remain anonymous prevents a fuller acknowledgment of their contributions to my work. But I am deeply indebted to them for their faith in my project and for the freedom to use and quote fully from papers which had not previously been opened.

Fellowship grants from Vassar College, the Johns Hopkins University, and the Social Science Research Council helped finance the preliminary work upon which this volume is based. A grant from the Faculty Research Council of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill eased the burdens of preparing the manuscript for publication.

For their patience with a neophyte author, I am very grateful to Richard L. Wentworth and Charles East of the Louisiana State University Press.

My husband, Professor Sydney Nathans of Duke University, has shared the crises of research and writing, from beginning to end.

ELIZABETH STUDLEY NATHANS Chapel Hill, North Carolina March 16, 1968

Contents

Preface vii

Acknowledgments xi Introduction 3

Toward a Political Party 17 Victory by Default 32

Introduction

Defiant Acquiescence

The spring of 1865 brought little joy to the white citizens of Georgia. Dazed by the destruction wrought by William Tecumseh Sherman’s Yankee “bummers” during the march from Atlanta to the sea the previous fall and winter, grieved by the loss of loved ones, and impoverished by four years of war, they now faced the formidable task of rebuilding their state.

As spring turned into summer and Georgians took stock of the work ahead, the labor of reconstruction seemed difficult, indeed.’ In the rural counties, failure to plant cotton in the early spring augured badly for the year’s crop. A plant-

1C, Mildred Thompson, Reconstruction in Georgia: Economic, Social, Political, 1865-1872 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1915), Chap. 2-5, contains an extensive summary of economic and social difficulties in Georgia at the end of the Civil War. See also Alan Conway, The Reconstruction of Georgia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1966), Chap. 2, 4, 5.

ing class already impoverished by the loss of $300 million in slave property found itself plagued by labor shortages as freedmen wandered off to test their liberty.”, Many who had lived comfortably in antebellum years on the income from their plantations now in desperation moved to the towns, seeking to use long-rusty professional skills to support struggling families.* Soldiers returning home faced run-down farms and pressing debts; few found ready jobs. On the outskirts of once proud cities, the squalor of refugee camps, both Negro and white, bespoke the personal tragedy of war.

Scars of battle were everywhere apparent. Railroads and telegraph lines, severed during Sherman’s march, had not yet been repaired. The port city of Savannah remained cut off from the interior of the state, her mail service disrupted and her railroads halted by miles of twisted and broken track.* In cities like Augusta, bypassed by Sherman’s plundering troops, only the presence of an “idle crowd” of Negroes in the streets testified to the changes war had brought. But along Sherman’s track, blank walls and skeleton houses stood as mute and somber reminders of the events of barely a half year before.°

Political disorganization in Georgia at the war's end matched the economic and social dislocation. The last decade before the war had seen the breakup of the national Whig party and had brought important changes to Georgia

? Annual Report of the Comptroller General of the State of Georgia... October 16, 1866 (Macon: J. W. Burke & Co., Stationers and State Printers, 1866), 30; John W. Kennaway, On Sherman’s Track: or, the South After the War (London: Seeley, Jackson, and Halliday, 1867), 122; Whitelaw Reid, After the War: A Southern Tour. May 1, 1865, to May 1, 1866 (New York: Moore, Wilstach & Baldwin, 1866), 146.

*W. W. Paine to Alexander H. Stephens, October 6, 1865, and J. Henly Smith to Stephens, December 30, 1865, in Alexander H. Stephens Papers, Library of Congress.

“Reid, After the War, 149-50.

* Kennaway, On Sherman’s Track, 107, 122.

state politics. As their own party splintered, state Whig leaders—including Robert Toombs and Alexander H. Stephens—reluctantly joined other nationally prominent Georgians like Howell Cobb and Herschel V. Johnson in the Democracy. Their change of affiliation precipitated a struggle for leadership within the Democratic party itself, a struggle for supremacy between older, established politicians and a rising generation of leaders. In the popular mind, the contest quickly became one between the planters and merchants of the wealthy “Black Belt” and seacoast counties and the white farmers of the barren North Georgia mountains and south-central wiregrass region, whose leader was a shrewd North Georgia lawyer, Joseph E. Brown. In 1857 Brown won a crucial gubernatorial contest over a young, diehard Whig, Benjamin H. Hill. His victory pointed the direction in which Georgia’s Democratic party would move throughout the Civil War years, for Brown built a personal following which ensured his reelection in 1859, 1861, and 1863. By 1865—despite the enmity of most Georgia editors and of former Whigs like Stephens and Toombs—Brown almost singlehandedly controlled the state. The end of the war, the imprisonment of prominent Confederate leaders, and, above all, the arrest of Brown by Federal troops in May, 1865, left a political vacuum in Georgia.

Had the banishment of old leaders been the only problem which plagued Georgia politicians in the spring of 1865, political reorganization would doubtless have been swift and relatively painless. But the removal of Brown and the exile of other leaders forcibly recalled to Georgians a fundamental, gnawing concern. Abraham Lincoln was dead; Andrew Johnson was President. Johnson's policies were unformulated, and his probable course toward the South was unknown. Until the new President made some public announcement of his plans, Georgians—like all Southerners—could do little except watch and wait.®

They waited in apprehension, for all knew the power of the Congressional Radicals who were pressing their advice on Johnson. Reconstruction of the South, these men believed, devolved by right to the legislative branch of the government. The Confederates, defeated by force of arms, must be broken in spirit. To this end, the most militant of the Radicals urged full civil rights for Negroes, confiscation of Southern lands, and punishment of all who had led in the rebellion against the government of the United States. Their demands were not new; Lincoln had faced them and had responded with his own moderate “10 percent plan” of restoration and with the pocket veto of the Radical Wade-Davis bill in the summer of 1864. What the Congressional Radicals had failed to secure from Lincoln, Southerners feared, they might now secure from his successor.

Andrew Johnson, however, proved more temperate in his course than Georgians had dared to hope. Restoration of the Southern states, he suggested, was an executive, not a legislative, function. Proclamations throughout the spring and summer of 1865 made it clear that the new President would not easily relinquish leadership to the Radicals.

Military rule had supplanted civilian government in Georgia as in the rest of the South, and Johnson believed his first task to be the establishment of some form of supervised civilian authority. On May 29 he issued the first of several proclamations designating provisional governors for the Southern states, and Georgians hastened to Washington to press the claims of candidates for the office in their state. Most thought Joshua Hill, a staunch Unionist and longtime

° On the problems and uncertainties facing both South and North at the end of the war, see Eric L. McKitrick, Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), Chap. 2.

opponent of Joseph Brown, the logical choice for Georgia, but Johnson apparently feared Hill’s Radical leanings.’ Instead, he turned to one of his own acquaintances, an obscure Columbus lawyer, a “plain and unassuming man” with a “pleasantly inexpressive face” and timid manner who was, nonetheless, reputed among Georgians to act with cool deliberation and good sense.® A presidential proclamation of June 17, 1865, named James Johnson provisional governor of Georgia. It would be his task to cooperate with the President and the army in directing civil affairs in Georgia, to supervise elections for a new constitutional convention, and to lead that convention in repealing the secession ordinance, abolishing slavery, and repudiating the Confederate debt.

The President kept in close touch with his provisional governor during the summer, but not even presidential prestige would have sufficed had Georgians been determined to resist federal authority. The mood in Georgia, however, was for the moment one not of resistance but of acquiescence. Federal officials in the state could not cope with the numbers of Georgians who flocked to take the oath of allegiance to the Union prescribed by the President for those wishing to vote in the fall elections or sit in the constitutional convention.® Prominent antebellum and wartime politicians en-

7 Joshua Hill to Andrew Johnson, May 10, 1865, in Andrew Johnson Papers, Library of Congress; Thompson, Reconstruction in Georgia, 146-47; Augusta Chronicle and Sentinel, June, 20, 1865; Olive Hall Shadgett, “James Johnson, Provisional Governor of Georgia,’ Georgia Historical Quarterly, XXXVI (March, 1952), 3; Macon Telegraph, June 7, 1865.

® Quotations from Sidney Andrews, The South Since the War: As Shown by Fourteen Weeks of Travel and Observation in Georgia and the Carolinas (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1866), 241. See also ibid., 243. Alexander H. Stephens characterized James Johnson as timid; see Myrta Lockett Avary (ed.), Recollections of Alexander H. Stephens (New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1910), 231.

® Joseph E. Brown to Andrew Johnson, July 21, 1865, July 25, 1865, both in Andrew Johnson Papers; Albany Patriot, July 22, 1865; Augusta Constitutionalist, August 6, 1865.

dorsed the President, the provisional governor, and their programs. Even Joseph E. Brown applied for and secured a presidential pardon on his promise to return to Georgia and stump the state in support of Andrew Johnson's plan for Southern restoration.*®

As Georgians prepared to elect their delegates to the new constitutional convention, it indeed seemed that all were prepared to cooperate in restoring their state speedily to the Union.* Old party ties had been broken, and no new ones had developed to take their place. Surrender to Federal armies had meant the eclipse of the fire-eating secessionist Democrats. Old-line Whigs, long thought to be unhappy in their alliance with the Democracy, made no attempt to revive their party. Party committees gave way to Union clubs, where old-line Whigs, antebellum Democrats of the Stephen A. Douglas persuasion, and even former secessionists like Brown united in bowing before the fact of defeat and urging cooperation with federal authorities.

Preparations for the election of delegates to the new constitutional convention proceeded smoothly. Most counties apparently made only a single nomination for each convention place, and there were no real contests. Eager to procure

*° Brown to Edwin M. Stanton, May 21, 1865, in Joseph E. Brown Papers in private possession; New York Tribune, June 2, 1865; Andrew Johnson to Edwin M. Stanton, copies of two letters dated June 3, 1865, in Edwin M. Stanton Papers, Library of Congress; Joseph E. Brown’s “Address to the People of Georgia,” June 30, 1865, in Executive Minutes of the State of Georgia, Georgia Department of Archives and History; and frequent letters from Brown to the President during the summer of 186s, in Andrew Johnson Papers.

* Executive Minutes of the State of Georgia, Georgia Department of Archives and History; Allen D. Chandler (Comp.), The Confederate Records of the State of Georgia (Atlanta: By authority of the Legislature, 1909), IV, 14ff; Macon Telegraph, July 16, 1865; Benjamin H. Hill to James Johnson, July 14, 1865, in Benjamin H. Hill Papers, Georgia Department of Archives and History; Augusta Chronicle and Sentinel, July 25, 1865; Rome Courier, September 28, 1865. For somewhat different reasoning on the need for

Georgians to cooperate with the federal government, see the Albany Patriot, July 22, 1865.

pardons and gain the right to vote, few Georgians cared as much, apparently, about casting their ballots when the elections were held on October 4. So slight was the attention paid to the elections that no voting returns were published.

But Northemers lulled into dreams of an easy and painless reconstruction by Georgians’ acceptance of federal authority in the summer of 1865 awoke with a start when the convention met on October 25. Though the nearly three hundred delegates failed to include the established leaders of Georgia politics, the antebellum and wartime chieftans who were themselves ineligible to serve under the terms of presidential proclamations had maneuvered to secure nominations for their own favorites.’? Those who would lead the convention might never have served in Congress or the cabinet, but most had held state or local office. Though these leaders were not ardent secessionists, most had been cooperationists in 1861 and had willingly followed their state into rebellion.’* Little consoled that the convention president, Herschel V. Johnson, had been vice-presidential candidate on the Stephen A. Douglas ticket in 1860, Northern observers grumbled that members of the convention failed to represent the truly loyal men of Georgia.*

James Johnson’s message to the convention charged its delegates with four tasks. They must abolish slavery, repeal the secession ordinance of 1861, repudiate the Confederate

Bristow to Stephens, September 14, 1865, in Alexander Stephens Papers, Library of Congress.

18 These conclusions about the social, economic, and political backgrounds of convention members are drawn from career line analysis of members of the Committee on Business, which prepared the agenda and controlled debate, and from generalizations in Thompson, Reconstruction in Georgia, 148-49, and Lucian Lamar Knight, A Standard History of Georgia and Georgians (Chicago: Lewis Publishing Company, 1917), II, 803-804.

14 Andrews, The South Since the War, 281-83. On Herschel V. Johnson, see Percy Scott Flippen, Herschel V. Johnson of Georgia: States Rights Unionist (Richmond: Press of the Dietz Printing Co., Publishers, 1931).

war debt, and frame a new constitution which would provide for the election of civil officers to replace the military authorities and the provisional government. Action on the secession ordinance and on slavery, urged by President Johnson, the provisional governor, and Brown, came swiftly.** But repudiation of the Confederate debt came more slowly and only after repeated proddings from the worried provisional governor and repeated threats from Andrew Johnson to delay the readmission of Georgia to the Union.*®

Despite this minor difficulty, however, most observers conceded that the convention acted with restraint during its three-week session. Though it passed ordinances permitting the provisional governor to borrow to meet the state’s pressing expenses, and though it adopted a stay ordinance, designed to aid Georgians burdened by heavy debts and failing crops or business until the General Assembly could enact a permanent relief law, it stayed generally within the bounds prescribed by the President and the provisional governor.1* Major problems of rebuilding—legislation defining the rights of the freedmen, permanent provisions for debtor relief, and measures for the financial rehabilitation of Georgia—remained unsolved as the delegates prepared to adjourn. But permanent legislation had not been their job. Under their guidance, under the leadership of this curious coalition of old-line Whigs and lifelong Democrats, Georgia had taken what appeared to be the first steps toward recovery. The delegates who in their final act before adjournment had

** Candler (comp.), Confederate Records of Georgia, IV, 38-45, 145- 46, 171-72; Georgia Constitution of 1865, Art. I, Sec. 20.

*° James Johnson to Andrew Johnson, October 27, 1865; Andrew Johnson to James Johnson, copy, October 28, 1865; James Johnson to Andrew Johnson, telegram, November 7, 1865, all in Andrew Johnson Papers. See also Candler (comp.), Confederate Records of Georgia, IV, 167-68, 305, 345-46, 403-404.

petitioned Andrew Johnson for Georgia’s readmission to the Union could well expect a swift and agreeable response to their plea.*®

But those who so confidently petitioned the President did not, and perhaps could not, realize that even as the convention adjourned and preparations began for new elections and the installation of a new state government, the unquestioning submission to federal authority which had marked Georgia politics in the summer of 1865 was breaking down. To be sure, the breakdown was not evident in the elections. The convention ordinance providing for balloting for governor, Congressmen, and state legislators on November 15 seemed innocuous enough, and Georgians appeared no more interested in these contests than they had been in the convention elections a few weeks before. Voters knew of but one candidate for the governorship—Charles Jones Jenkins, an antebellum Whig turned Democrat, who had chaired the powerful Committee of Sixteen which had determined the agenda of the constitutional convention.’® Many candidates for the General Assembly and for Congress also ran unopposed. All had little time to mobilize popular opinion, and all confined their campaign efforts to public letters urging support for James Johnson and the work of the constitutional convention. Most editors followed the lead of the Macon Telegraph in avoiding discussion of specific issues and in merely urging the election of the “best” men for each office.”°

Those admitted to the innermost councils of Georgia politics, however, should have noted the warning signs. The loose, bipartisan coalition which had dominated state politics in 1865 had seriously considered nominating both Joseph E. Brown and Confederate Vice-President Alexander H.

1° Albany Patriot, November 11, 1865. 20 Macon Telegraph, October 28, 1865.

Stephens for the governorship before deciding to ensure the continued support of former Whigs by selecting Jenkins.” Of the seven Congressmen-elect, one had been an ardent secessionist, and all had served the Confederacy. Georgians, it seemed, would submit to federal authority—but they would not repudiate their old leaders. And repudiation of antebellum and wartime leaders was precisely what an increasingly restive Congress demanded.

Matters came to a head in Georgia soon after Jenkins replaced Provisional Governor Johnson and the new General Assembly convened. At first, there seemed little reason to expect difficulty. The legislature speedily ratified the Thirteenth Amendment to the federal Constitution, and Governor Jenkins’ inaugural message painted a cheerful picture of Georgia’s progress toward economic and political recovery.” Though the new governor dwelt on the inferiority of the Negro and demanded stringent measures for his control, he called for the admission of Negro testimony in the courts.

*1 Alexander H. Stephens to Joseph E. Brown, November 11, 1865; Stephens to Brown, November 15, 1865; Stephens to Brown, November 30, 1865, all in Joseph E. Brown Papers, Felix Hargrett Collection, University of Georgia. See also Robert Toombs to Stephens, Havana, Cuba, December 15, 1865, in Ulrich Bonnell Phillips (ed.), The Correspondence of Robert Toombs, Alexander H. Stephens, and Howell Cobb (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1913), 673-76; M. C. Fulton to Stephens, November 29, 1865, in Alexander Stephens Papers, Library of Congress; and Brown to Stephens, November 14, 1865, in Alexander H. Stephens Papers, Emory University. On the negotiations leading to Jenkins’ nomination, see also Howell Cobb to his wife, November 5, 1865, in Howell Cobb Papers, University of Georgia; A. R. Watson to Stephens, November 6, 186s, P. Thweatt to Stephens, November 10, 1865, O. A. Lochrane to Stephens, November 22, 1865, all in Alexander Stephens Papers, Library of Congress; J. B. Dumble to Stephens, Macon, November 17, 1865, in Alexander Stephens Papers, Emory University; Linton Stephens to Alexander H. Stephens, November 20, 1865, in Alexander Stephens Papers, Manhattanville College of the Sacred Heart; and Stephens to Jenkins, November 12, 1865, in Telamon Cuyler Collection, University of Georgia.

** Journal of the Senate of the State of Georgia, 1865-6, 17-18; Journal of the House of Representatives of the State of Georgia, 1865-6, 16-17.

A correspondent for the New York Times reported that Jenkins’ remarks had included a “handsome tribute” to the conduct of the freedmen, and the Times seemed impressed by the new governor's “liberal, kindly . . . [and] temperate” speech.” Even Georgia’s Black Code, moderate by comparison with those in other states, occasioned no unfavorable comment.”* Rather, it was the election of the United States Senators which helped dash hopes that Georgia would gain prompt readmission to the Union and which furnished fresh ammunition to Northern Radical Republicans already angered by the President’s policies and eager to place Reconstruction more directly under Congressional control. Although President Johnson on November 24, 1865, had made clear his wish that Alexander Stephens not be chosen,” the General Assembly in January, 1866, rejected the candidacy of Georgia’s foremost Unionist, Joshua Hill, and elected Stephens and Herschel V. Johnson to the state’s two United States Senate seats.2* Stephens and Johnson, doubtless pleased by their selection, nonetheless understood better than most Georgians the probable effect of the balloting. While Johnson mourned to Stephens that the legislature had acted unwisely, and while Stephens dispatched pained assurances of his loyalty and regard to the President in Washington,”’ white Georgians rejoiced in the assembly's choice.”* Georgians’ reaction contrasted sharply with that of North-

23 New York Times, December 17, 18, 1865.

25 Johnson to Gen. J. B. Steedman, telegram, November 24, 1865, in Andrew Johnson Papers.

26 Journal of the House of Representatives of the State of Georgia, 1865- 6, 190-201.

27 Herschel V. Johnson to Alexander H. Stephens, Augusta, February 1, 1866, in Herschel V. Johnson Papers, Duke University; Stephens to Andrew Johnson, telegram, January 31, 1866, in Andrew Johnson Papers.

28 Augusta Chronicle and Sentinel, February 8, 1866; Augusta Constitutionalist, February 11, 1866; Macon Telegraph, February 7, 1866.

ern editors and most Republican Congressmen, who saw in the election of such prominent Confederates as Stephens irrefutable proof of continuing Southern recalcitrance. Georgia’s seven Congressmen-elect had never been seated, and the Senate’s refusal to accept the credentials of either Stephens or Johnson was hardly surprising.

Understanding that the presidential program of Reconstruction was rapidly falling before the onslaughts of Congressional Radicals and that they themselves had contributed to the process came only slowly to Georgians in the summer of 1866. A few of the most prominent antebellum leaders were the first to sense the situation, and these men responded to pleas from Andrew Johnson’s backers for all moderate Republicans and Democrats to unite in a National Union convention at Philadelphia in September.”® Correspondence between Georgia leaders and the President’s supporters led quickly to a flock of public meetings in July and August, summoned to ratify the convention call and nominate delegates to district, state, and finally the national gatherings.°°

In the local and state rallies, Democratic stalwarts temporarily silenced at the end of the war formally reentered politics. At no level did the lists of those prominent in the convention proceedings contain many surprises, for these men were scarcely newcomers to Georgia politics. Local leaders

*° Alexander H. Stephens to Montgomery Blair, July 13, 1866, in Blair— Gist Family Papers, Library of Congress; Herschel V. Johnson to Stephens, Augusta, July 5 and 16, 1866, in Herschel V. Johnson Papers, Duke University. See also Stephens to Johnson, July 18, 1866, Johnson to Stephens, July 20, 1866, and Johnson to “My Dear Sir,” July 2, 1866, all in Herschel V. Johnson Papers, Duke University.

**Rome Courier, July 12, 1866; Dawson Journal, July 13 and 27, August 3, 1866; Sandersville Central Georgian, August 15, 1866; Albany Patriot, August 4, 1866; Augusta Chronicle and Sentinel, July 3, 5, 6, 10, 12, and 15, 1866. A complete list of delegates and alternates to the rn ta convention appears in the Augusta Constitutionalist, August

, 1866.

—David Irwin, E. G. Cabaniss, Augustus Reese, E. A. Nisbet, James Jackson, and A. H. Colquitt—had rendered active service in earlier Democratic campaigns. Behind them and behind several of the delegates to the Philadelphia convention, including Linton Stephens, Judge Hiram Warner, and General John Brown Gordon, Democrats united in the summer of 1866 to begin rebuilding their party at the local, county, and state levels. In 1867 these supporters of the National Union movement would combine with other opponents of Congressional Reconstruction to form the new statewide Democratic Executive Committee.

In the autumn of 1866, however, there seemed even to leaders like Herschel Johnson and Alexander Stephens little need for such permanent, formal party organizations. As enthusiasm for the abortive National Union movement waned, apparent political stagnation returned. Candidates for Congress in the fall of 1866 met only apathy; even their denunciations of the Radical program for Reconstruction and of the proposed Fourteenth Amendment failed to evoke popular response.** Preoccupied with crop failures and plagued by economic distress more severe than they had experienced even in 1865, most Georgians seemed unconcerned with political events and failed to grasp the import of Radical victories in the nationwide Congressional elections.

Equally uncomprehending were Governor Jenkins and the members of the General Assembly. Presented by Congress with the Fourteenth Amendment, the Georgia legislature— like its counterparts in other Southern states—rejected ratification on November g by a nearly unanimous vote.”

A humiliated and discredited Andrew Johnson, no longer