ivil Rights Bill became
a law. President Johnson's defeat was more fatal than appeared on the
surface. The prestige he had won by the success of his veto of the
Freedmen's Bureau Bill was lost again. The Republicans, whom in some way
he had led to expect that he would sign the Civil Rights Bill, now
believed him to be an insincere man capable of any treachery. The last
chance of an accommodation with the Republican party was now utterly
gone. But, worse than all, the reactionists in the South, who were bent
upon curtailing the freedom of the emancipated negroes as much as
possible, received his veto of the Civil Rights Bill with shouts of
delight. Believing him now unalterably opposed to the bestowal, upon the
freedmen, of equal civil rights such as were specified in the bill, they
hailed President Johnson as their champion more loudly than ever.
Undisturbed by the defeat of the veto, which they looked upon as a mere
temporary accident, they easily persuaded themselves that the President,
aided by the Administration Republicans and the Democratic party at the
North, would at last surely prevail, and that now they might safely deal
with the negro and the labor question in the South as they pleased. The
reactionary element felt itself encouraged to the point of foolhardiness
by the President's attitude. Legislative enactments and municipal
ordinances and regulations tending to reduce the colored people to a
state of semi-slavery multiplied at a lively rate. Measures taken for
the protection of the emancipated slaves were indiscriminately denounced
in the name of the Constitution of the United States as acts of
insufferable tyranny. The instant admission to seats in the national
Congress of senators and representatives from the "States lately in
rebellion" was loudly demanded as a constitutional right, and for these
seats men were presented who but yesterday had stood in arms against the
national government, or who had held high place in the insurrectionary
Confederacy. And the highest authority cited for all these denunciations
and demands was Andrew Johnson, President of the United States.

The impression made by these things upon the minds of the Northern
people can easily be imagined. Men of sober ways of thinking, not
accessible to sensational appeals, asked themselves quite seriously
whether there was not real danger that the legitimate results of the
war, for the achievement of which they had sacrificed uncounted
th