The American Vice Presidency (32 page)

With the Republicans in the Senate majority, Wilson became chairman of the Military Affairs Committee. For a time he served as an aide-de-camp to General George McClellan, later agreeing with the criticism of the general’s cautious leadership. Back in the Senate, Wilson was among the Radical Republicans who pushed for ending the slave trade in the District of Columbia, for taking blacks into the Union army, for equal pay for them there, and for Lincoln to issue an early emancipation proclamation. When the Emancipation Proclamation was finally made public in January 1863, it was accompanied by authorization to take the freedmen into the armed forces.

In 1865, as the war ground mercifully toward an end and Grant accepted Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, Wilson joined other public figures of the North on a steamer trip to Charleston for a celebratory flag-raising ceremony at Fort Sumter on April 14. Two days later he boarded again for the party’s next stop in Florida when he received a telegram on deck. He went to his cabin to read it and suddenly reappeared in a state of shock. “Good God! The President is killed!” he wailed to his companions. The ship turned northward for Washington amid its passengers’ despair and confusion about what the future would bring.
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Wilson himself realized that the end of armed combat did not mean the end of the quest for restoring the Union and extending its liberties to
the newly freed slaves. Speaking to the Boston chapter of the American Antislavery Society later in May, he warned that “the dark spirits of slavery still live,” and the group’s duty to wipe out its injustices remained “as clear as the track of the sun across the heavens, that is, to enfranchise every black man in the Republic.”
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At the same time, he opposed meting out the death penalty or lengthy prison terms to most Confederate officials, including the Confederate president Jefferson Davis, saying he deserved a speedy trial for treason or quick release.

In this sense, Wilson initially seemed to be in harmony with the first reconstruction steps of the new president, Andrew Johnson. But Johnson, in his determination to bring the rebel states back into the Union, soon exhibited what the Radical Republicans saw as excessive and even unjust leniency toward the South. Wilson soon was in the forefront of the Republican drive to derail presidential reconstruction and replace it with a congressional agenda laden with devices to combat continued southern white repression of the newly freed black slaves. In a July 4 speech to a black crowd in Washington, he promised to introduce in the first postwar session of Congress a civil rights bill outlawing racial discrimination and giving blacks the vote. He did so, but it won support only from the Radical Republicans and ultimately failed.

Later, however, as Johnson vetoed other legislative proposals to the same purpose, including extension of the Freedmen’s Bureau, moderate Republicans joined the Radicals in a direct clash with Lincoln’s successor, whose abiding hostility toward blacks became abundantly apparent. Wilson continued to insist that black suffrage was the key to breaking the white stranglehold on the South; he wanted to make it a condition by which southerners could again hold office in the Union, but Johnson would have none of it.

Prior to the 1866 congressional elections, Wilson attacked the National Union Convention in Philadelphia designed to rally support for Johnson, condemning it as “a conglomeration of pardoned and unpardoned rebels, copperheads and the flunkies of the Whig party.”
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He campaigned aggressively through the North and as far west as Chicago, traveling more than three thousand miles in opposition to Johnson’s presidential reconstruction. In the fall elections, rejection of Johnson’s agenda was overwhelming,
with the coalition of moderate Republicans and the Radical Republicans capturing a clear two-thirds majority in the next Congress.

Wilson interpreted the result as a mandate from northern voters for black suffrage. He pushed particularly for the franchise in the District of Columbia and embarked on a tour of the South to assuage whites and bring them back into the Union as Republican voters. He took pains at the same time to persuade the black freedmen to eschew any thought of racial conflict: “See to it that while you are pulling yourself up, you don’t pull others down.” And he warned them that it would not be possible to “legislate you into any man’s parlor.” Laws could protect their civil rights, he said, “but your own brains, heart, conscience and life must fix your social position.”
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Still, his message was a hard sell to the defeated white South. Wilson shared Johnson’s desire to bring the region back into the Union, but he also wanted greater consideration for the freedmen than the president proposed. In statewide elections in 1867, Wilson’s efforts to advance universal suffrage were rebuffed. In February 1868, when Johnson was impeached by the House but acquitted in the Senate in his firing of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, the Radical Republicans saw their chance to seize the executive branch. Wilson entertained personal ambitions to gain a place on the Republican ticket with U. S. Grant, as a unifying leader.

In late May, with the Senate debating the readmission of seven southern states to the Union, Wilson rose and impatiently called on the Republican majority to allow the readmission as soon as the states ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, as required. “I would welcome back these states with their reform constitutions with a glad heart, with bonfires, with illuminations,” he said, openly noting that doing so would “give more than one hundred thousand majority for General Grant.”

In advance of the Republican National Convention, the Massachusetts state party advocated Wilson for the vice presidency, but he lacked wider support even in New England, and House Speaker Schuyler Colfax was nominated. The Democrats meanwhile brushed aside incumbent Johnson and chose New York governor Horatio Seymour with General Frank P. Blair Jr. as his running mate. Throughout the fall, Wilson toured eight states speaking for the Grant-Colfax ticket, unabashedly waving “the bloody shirt,” charging at one New York rally that no Union soldier killed
“was sent to his account by a Republican bullet. Let the mothers, wives and sisters of the North remember this.… There are over four hundred thousand heroes beneath the sod. Who sent them there? Democrats!”
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On Election Night, the Republican victory in the popular vote was lower than expected, but Grant and Colfax won easily in the electoral college.

During Grant’s first term, Wilson remained dissatisfied with the protection of blacks in the South. He appealed specifically for federal action against the rising Ku Klux Klan, for construction of more public schools in the South, and for an end to school segregation in the District of Columbia. Although the work of Reconstruction was far from completed, the issue lost much of its intensity. Wilson began to focus less on “slave power” and more on “money power” in the hands of corporate America and the ramifications for the working man. He called for a “new departure” for the Republican Party in supporting shorter working hours, protections against imported labor, and civil service reform. He also resumed his long interest in temperance and women’s rights, broadening his reputation as a champion of the underdog.

In September 1870, when Vice President Colfax suddenly announced that he would not seek a second term in 1872, Wilson rekindled his ambition for the office. Considerable dissatisfaction with Grant was being heard within the Republican Party over his annexation of the Caribbean island of Santo Domingo through a treaty, which was then rejected by the Senate. When Colfax then changed his mind and said if chosen again he would run, Wilson at first considered withdrawing but agreed to stay in the race and was nominated.

In early September, the New York
Sun
broke the story of the Credit Mobilier scandal, listing Wilson along with Colfax as members of Congress who had received railroad stock for their support in the building of the Union Pacific Railroad. Wilson was reported at first to have flatly denied it. Questioned by a House investigating committee, he acknowledged that he had bought the stock in his wife’s name but later returned it and got his money back. The committee finally cleared him of wrongdoing other than first calculating to create “an erroneous impression” to the public.

In the fall, Grant left the active campaigning to Wilson, who traveled ten thousand miles and made ninety-six speeches in behalf of the Republican ticket, against the Democratic presidential nominee, the New York
editor Horace Greeley. Playing on the working-class backgrounds of the Republican candidates, a campaign banner showed Grant as “the Galena tanner,” whose father indeed ran a leather tannery, and Wilson as the Natick shoemaker, both in workers’ aprons.
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The Republican ticket easily won the popular vote and all 286 electoral votes, because two weeks after the election Greeley died, before the electoral college met.

Wilson’s campaign exertions took a heavy toll, incapacitating him for most of his vice presidency. In May 1873, barely two months after being inaugurated, he suffered a stroke at age sixty-one, leaving him without control of his facial muscles and unable to talk when fatigued. Disregarding doctors after a brief summer convalescence, he returned to Washington to preside over the Senate but had to return home to Massachusetts a month later. There he spent his time writing a long history of the slave power and his role in combating it during the Civil War and the Reconstruction era.
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Wilson heaped blame on Grant for the failures of Reconstruction, diminishing his own role in the Credit Mobilier scandal and that of other scandals involving the administration. He told Congressman James Garfield that Grant was “more unpopular than Andrew Johnson was in his darkest days” by virtue of terrible appointments, was “still struggling for a third term,” and was “the millstone around the neck of [the Republican] party that would sink it out of sight.”
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In early 1875, Wilson undertook a six-week tour of the South, creating suspicions that he might try for the presidency himself the next year, but that fall he went to his doctor complaining of head pain, soon suffered another stroke, and on November 22 died in his Senate president’s office at age sixty-three. Henry Wilson had served in the vice presidency less than three years, and for most of that time he had been incapacitated, in disagreement with the president under whom he served, and was essentially disregarded by him.

Once again, a vice president had neither sought nor been accorded any significant share of executive power. And once again the second office would remain vacant for more than a year, to little evident public concern. Yet in the station Henry Wilson did reach in public life, he could claim considerable achievement in defending and improving the lot of the working class from which he had climbed, of whatever race and economic stature.

WILLIAM A. WHEELER

OF NEW YORK

F
rom the earliest years of the vice presidency, one of its only attractions for the ambitious politician was the possibility of ascension to the presidency, but no occupant aspired to that objective less than William Almon Wheeler of New York. Wheeler was content to remain a U.S. congressman from the upstate small town of Malone, which his speech accepting the Republican vice presidential nomination in 1876 made clear: “It is an honor which comes to me unexpectedly, which I did not seek, and which I say in all frankness I did not desire. So long as I might remain in the public service my preference was to remain in the House of Representatives.”
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William Wheeler seemed an unlikely figure to have any political future at all. Born in Malone near the Canadian border on June 30, 1819, his father, Almon Wheeler, died in debt and in ill health at age thirty-seven, when the boy was only eight years old, leaving his destitute mother, Eliza, to raise him and a brother. She took in boarders from a nearby academy, and he performed farming chores to help while attending local public schools. He scraped up enough money by age nineteen to attend the University of Vermont for two years but had to quit with eye trouble. He then studied law under a local attorney for four years and was admitted to the New York bar. But he again became ill with a throat ailment that forced him to abandon his profession in 1851.
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In fact, ill health plagued Wheeler throughout his life, limiting his engagement as a political speaker.

Turning to politics, he became the Malone town clerk at an annual salary of thirty dollars and taught in a neighboring town school for ten dollars a month. He wrote much later of the time, “I built many air castles in those days, but this [vice presidential] nomination was not among the structures.”
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In 1867, he was elected a delegate at large to a state constitutional convention and was chosen its presiding officer. In unanticipated preparation for fulfilling his later responsibility as president of the U.S. Senate, he could not participate in the convention’s debates, causing a colleague, Erastus Brooks, to call the limitation “a severe ordeal for a man of ability, literally putting a padlock upon his mind.” He made committee appointments without regard to party, saying at the time, “I came to the chair with the single purpose of administering its duties fairly and impartially; remembering that the trust confided in us was neither for majorities nor minority, but for all alike as citizens of a common State.”
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Subsequently elected to the state Senate, he was chosen its speaker pro tem on the strength of that earlier service. Thereafter, during his five terms in the U.S. Congress, Wheeler was judged by one observer to be “a kind of legislative conscience” to other members who looked to his rare comments on the floor and to his votes for guidance.
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