NOW EVERYTHING HAPPENED. Since those who attended it were still unaware of the pistol-on-the-ice episode in Lexington, the New York fund-raising meeting for Washington College went splendidly. The school was praised; Henry Ward Beecher ringingly commended Lee to his moneyed audience as a man who was “pleading for mental bread for his students” and was trying to instill in them a love for the entire country. The campaign was off to a fine start in the nation’s richest city. No collection was taken at the end of the meeting, the organizers feeling that the hundreds of potential large donors could best be approached by a further letter and by personal meetings in their offices.
Failing to pass the hat while they had the chance was a mistake, because New Yorkers were soon reading several blistering columns in the New York Independent. The newspaper was receiving complaints about the fund-raising from many old abolitionists who thought that a college headed by Lee was no fit destination for Northern dollars. Starting with the discredited accusation that Lee was responsible for the deaths of Union prisoners at Andersonville, the Independent told its readers: “We do not think that a man who broke his solemn oath of allegiance to the United States, who imbrued his hands in the blood of tens of thousands of his country’s noblest men, for the purpose of perpetuating human slavery . . . is fitted to be a teacher of young men.”
Then the Independent, harking back to an attack it had made on Lee soon after the war, came up with an imaginative variation of the recent slurs on him in the Senate: “. . . the last thing that Gen. Lee did, as an officer of the American Army, was to hold an interview with Gen. Scott at his request; and, when Gen. Scott, trusting to his loyalty, showed him his maps and drawings of the defences of Washington, he took them with him to Arlington, upon pretense that he wished to examine them more particularly and then, without returning them, went over to the rebel side!”
The newspaper then disinterred old and baseless stories that Lee had treated the slaves at Arlington “with atrocious cruelty,” and moved to a new topic. In a story that confused V.M.I. with Washington College, it represented some cadets as saying that they wore grey uniforms because “we won’t wear the d_d Yankee blue at Gen. Lee’s school.”
When the friends of Johnston of the ice-skating incident read this issue of the Independent, they knew that they had found their forum. One of them wrote a letter to the editor that began, “Residing in Lexington, and having seen more or less of the students and professors of Washington College daily since Lee ascended to the presidency of the institution, I feel it my duty to give the people a few facts, which will, I trust, show the philanthropists of the North the animus of the institution to which they are contributing.” Then came an account in which everyone on the ice that day was a Washington College student. The twelve-year-old boy who cursed Johnston vanished from the story, and he pulled his pistol to save himself from a mob that, “without the least provocation,” attacked him “only because he was a hated Yankee.” Beneath this letter the Independent admonished its readers that money given to Washington College would be “worse than thrown away.”
In the same issue the paper carried an article by the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, urging that no one contribute to Washington College. Unaware of, or unwilling to acknowledge, Lee’s widely known conciliatory postwar attitudes, Garrison first characterized the South as being an area of “universal ignorance” that was “still wishing to rule in hell rather than serve in heaven.” He went on to scorn Lee: “Who is . . . more obdurate than himself? He at the head of a patriotic institution, teaching loyalty to the Constitution, and the duty of maintaining that Union he so lately attempted to destroy! . . . Has Lucifer regained his position in Heaven? . . . If the South could reasonably hope to succeed in another rebellious uprising, and should make the attempt, who can show us any ground for believing that Gen. Lee would not again act as generalissimo of her forces?”
That was only the beginning. The New York Times and the New York Tribune picked up the story, and the Chicago Daily Tribune called Washington College “a school run principally for the propagation of hatred to the Union.” Even months later, the Boston Evening Traveller said that the job of the “arch traitor Lee” was to instruct his students in “more treason,” and warned that Northern donations would be used for “paying traitors to teach their damnable treason to the flower of southern’youth.” The Independent returned to the fray several times, once with a warning by a clergyman from Tennessee that money sent to Washington College would forge “implements for another and bloodier conflict” and sharpen “the knives wherewith to cut the throats of the givers.” A Northern woman who had for a time taught a school for blacks in Lexington wrote, “Never did I walk the streets of Lexington without rudeness, in one form or another. Ladies glorified in compelling the Yankee woman, in her good nature, to step into the mud for their accommodation; the boys of the aristocratic school of the place hooted every time I passed them, and the students sneered and cursed alternately.” She added that she had received threats that her school would be burned, and that “these same gentlemanly young men” had thrown brickbats at the school windows while she was teaching an evening class to black adults.
There was some truth in what the Northern woman wrote in her letter to the Independent, but the Boston Evening Traveller was demonstrably wrong on one count: as a college president, the paper said, Lee “is a perfect nonentity, except as to the drawing of his salary.”
While this unfavorable publicity continued—the vital contributions from the North fell to a third of what they had been the previous year—a new crisis occurred in Lexington.
As with the ice-skating incident, the setting could not have been more peaceful. On the quiet evening of May 8, Mrs. John Brocken-brough, wife of the judge, was walking home with her son Francis, who was not quite old enough to attend the college. A group of black men were standing about the sidewalk in front of the Brockenbrough house. They “refused to give the pavement,” as a student put it, forcing Mrs. Brockenbrough and her son to step into the gutter to get around them and to their front gate. Enraged, young Francis saw his mother to the door, came back down the walk, and attacked one of the blacks with a stick. The black drew a pistol and shot him in the chest.
The spring night became wild. At the same moment that the doctors were fighting to save Francis’ life, one of his older brothers dashed into the room of a friend at the college “and said that his brother had been shot by a negro over in town. He asked me to dress and go out with them to catch the negro. He got a large crowd of students together and we went out in different directions around town. One party succeeded in getting him and they came very near lynching him.”
They came very near indeed. The black, Caesar Griffin, would certainly have been hanging from a tree had it not been for one of those timely arrivals that had quelled earlier disturbances. This time the students had a rope around their intended victim’s neck and had marched him to the courthouse square—the preferred place for lynchings, since it implied that justice had been done. Assistant Professor Harry Estill, a former Confederate captain, strode out of the night. The slender, black-bearded veteran ordered the students to turn their captive over to the jailer, and they did.
The shooting took place on a Friday night. On Sunday, with Francis still between life and death, the word began to be passed around the campus that should he die, some of the students intended to storm the jail and kill Caesar Griffin.
Rumor or genuine plan, word of it came to the lieutenant of the United States Twenty-ninth Infantry Regiment who was military commissioner for Lexington. He called on Lee, who judged it to be wild talk but moved swiftly nonetheless. Because it was a Sunday, the students were scattered all over the pleasant May landscape. Lee immediately communicated with Givens B. Strickler, the student who had left school at the end of his freshman year in 1861 to join and subsequently command the Liberty Hall Volunteers. Seven years later, he was at last a senior, soon to graduate. He was the president of the college’s large Y.M.C.A. group, which taught Sunday schools throughout the area and had a large meeting on Sunday evenings. Lee told Strickler to pass this message through the Y.M.C.A. network, and to have it read at the evening meeting, so that all students would be aware of it by nightfall: “I earnestly invoke the students to abstain from any violation of the law, and to unite in preserving quiet and order on this and every occasion.”
For days, the situation in Lexington remained tense; several pistols were fired in the air. A company of the Twenty-ninth Infantry arrived to patrol the streets. Francis Brockenbrough recovered, and the calmed students prepared for their final examinations.
In mid-May, the drama of the impeachment trial in Washington moved toward its climax. Each day, President Johnson remained at his desk in the White House while his defense lawyers appeared on his behalf on the floor of the United States Senate. The prosecution was conducted by selected members of the House of Representatives. The judges were the fifty-four senators, of whom thirty-six had to vote “guilty” in order to remove Andrew Johnson from the presidency. Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase presided. The members of the House of Representatives, present as spectators, sat in chairs jammed along the back of the Senate chamber. Tickets to the Visitors’ Gallery were the most sought-after pieces of paper in Washington; as if each day of the trial were a first night at the theater, the ladies vied in wearing the most fashionable dresses, and a shade that became known as Impeachment Blue was all the rage.
There was terrific after-hours lobbying among the senators to influence their votes. Lee’s old adversary Ulysses S. Grant was among those working hard to oust President Johnson. Although the real case against the President was that he was thwarting the Republicans’ Reconstruction program, the principal charge against him was that he had violated a questionable law known as the Tenure of Office Act. This was a piece of legislation enacted by the Radicals for the chief purpose of preventing Johnson from firing Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, who was conspiring with Johnson’s Radical foes while continuing to sit in Johnson’s innermost councils as a member of the Cabinet. In his efforts to precipitate a test of this law’s constitutionality, President Johnson had asked Grant to continue serving as acting secretary of war after he suspended Stanton from office. When the Senate refused to concur in Stanton’s removal, Grant stepped aside in a manner that Johnson felt was a violation of the agreement between them. Johnson was outraged; Grant made excuses. In a barrage of public accusations and counteraccusations between Grant and Johnson, Grant had fallen into step with the Radicals and was on his way to the Republican nomination. Now, with his eye on the Republican convention in Chicago at the end of the month, General Grant threw aside any pretense that he was still an army officer who should stand aside from party politics. He hated the President for the earlier acid exchange; Grant wanted Johnson out of the White House, now, and said so to every senator he could find.
As for Lee, he had been summoned to Richmond to make an appearance in another trial, that of Jefferson Davis. When he arrived, he found the proceedings again postponed.
All of this—Reconstruction, the trial of Davis, the trial of the President—deeply troubled Lee and put Mary into such a state of brooding that he feared it might worsen her physical condition. Writing to his twenty-seven-year-old cousin Annette Carter, Lee’s tone differed from the bantering, flirtatious letters of earlier years. Along with many Democrats and some Republicans, he saw the trial of the President as an effort to destroy the power of the executive branch and to realign the traditional balance of power among the executive, the legislative, and the judiciary. To Annette, he deplored what he saw as “this grand scheme of centralization of power in the hands of one branch of the Govt, to the ruin of all others, and the anihilation [sic] of the Constitution, the liberty of the people and of the country . . . I grieve for posterity, for American principles and American liberty. Our boasted self Govt, is fast becoming the jeer and laughing-stock of the world.”
Although Virginians could not vote for President in this election year because their state was not readmitted to the Union, Lee believed that every white Southerner who could vote should do so. This was in contrast to the views of many recent Confederates, who felt that casting a vote in either a state or national election was to indicate approval of Federal Reconstruction policies. In their view, the new racially integrated state legislatures left almost all of the eight million Southern whites out of the political process: the blacks did not represent their interests, and the non-Confederate whites who had been the only whites eligible for election did not represent them either.
Lee agreed that the majority of white Southerners had no effective representation, but he felt that the only way to change this was to act as he had counseled his young officers to act on the way home from Appomattox: vote if you can; get a toehold. Although he said in a conversation, “I am rejoiced that slavery is abolished,” Lee was opposed to granting the vote to the blacks. He saw the alliance between blacks and Republicans as a threat to white Southerners. In a letter to Rob, he characterized the blacks as “those who are plotting and working for your injury and all of whose sympathies and aspirations are antagonistic to yours.” In the next sentence he softened somewhat: “I wish them no evil in the world—on the contrary, will do them every good in my power, and know that they are misled by those to whom they have given their confidence; but our material, social and political interests are naturally with the whites.”
News of the impeachment trial’s results came from Washington. By three identical votes of thirty-five to nineteen on three separate charges, the Senate had defeated the Republican attempt to throw Andrew Johnson out of the White House. If the Republicans could have mustered just one more vote on any of the three charges to reach the thirty-six needed for a two-thirds majority, Johnson would not have survived. In Virginia, Lee wrote of the trial of Jefferson Davis, “God grant that, like the impeachment of Mr. Johnson, it may be dismissed.”
It was not yet to be, for Jefferson Davis. Lee was summoned again to Richmond for the Davis trial, to find that it had again been postponed, from June 3 to November 30. Returning to Lexington, where the students were starting their final examinations, Lee found political talk everywhere. The Republican convention in Chicago had, as expected, nominated Ulysses S. Grant as the party’s candidate for President.
Grant was discovering that politicians are treated less politely than conquering generals. The brilliant and snobbish historian Henry Adams, a Bostonian certainly sympathetic to the Union cause, was aghast at the thought of Grant as President; he saw Grant as a man so primitive that he should have been extinct “for ages”; this prehistoric throwback should live in a cave; instead of a uniform, Grant should have “worn skins.”
If that was a Northern opinion, there were equally unflattering Southern ones. In a group that included Lee, one member of his faculty unburdened himself of some scathing words about the Republican candidate.
Lee’s face flushed. For him there was only the Grant of Appomattox, the man who had sent the officers of the Army of Northern Virginia home with their swords and pistols at their sides, the man who had released captured horses to be taken home to plow Southern fields for a desperately needed crop.
“Sir,” Lee said, “if you ever again presume to speak disrespectfully of General Grant in my presence, either you or I will sever his connection with this university.”
Though he did not wish it, a public comparison of himself with Grant was about to be made. Soon after the graduation ceremonies in the newly dedicated chapel that meant so much to Lee, the New York Herald printed a fascinating editorial.
The last time Lee had been mentioned in Northern newspapers was to be flayed in the aftermath of the Johnston fracas in Lexington. Now the Herald began by pointing out that, though the Republicans had chosen General Grant, the Democrats had yet to hold their convention and name their candidate. It seemed to be a year for considering soldiers as candidates, the Herald said; the Democratic Party was thinking about various Union generals who were Democrats as a counterpoise to the Republicans’ Grant.
Now the surprise. Let the Democratic Party forget the Union generals. “We will recommend a candidate for its favors. Let it nominate General R. E. Lee. Let it boldly take over the best of all its soldiers, making no palaver or apology. He is a better soldier than any of those they have thought upon and a greater man.”
Here, thirty-eight months after Appomattox, in the city where they had yelled for his blood, a leading newspaper was putting forward his name for President of the United States. “For this soldier, with a handful of men whom he had moulded into an army, baffled our greater Northern armies for four years; and when opposed by Grant was only worn down by that solid strategy of stupidity that accomplishes its object by mere weight.”
This was, of course, appearing in a newspaper heavily committed to the Democratic Party and strongly opposed to Republican Reconstruction policies, but the paper was going far out of its way in recommending Lee to Northern Democrats, among whom were so many Union Army veterans who had risked their lives as surely as had their Republican comrades. The action spoke volumes for the special place that Lee was coming to hold among his former enemies. The Herald warmed to its endorsement.
With one quarter the men Grant had this soldier fought magnificently across the territory of his native state, and fought his army to a stump. There never was such an army or such a campaign, or such a General for illustrating the military genius and possibilities of our people; and this General is the best of all for a Democratic candidate. It is certain that with half as many men as Grant he would have beaten him from the field in Virginia, and he affords the best promise of any soldier for beating him again.
There it was, the highest compliment that they could pay him. Naturally, the proposal was doomed; it was possible that the Herald did not understand that Lee had not been restored to citizenship and was not eligible to run. Democratic Party leaders were not even remotely considering Lee, and he would have considered such a move to be the surest way of reopening the wounds of war he was trying to heal, but it was a startling tribute.