The newspaper clippings attached to the petition relayed the “disgraceful scenes” of violence and required Confederate attestations that had unfolded at Norfolk municipal elections, the new daily reality of freedmen being “hunted down like dogs and dispatched without ceremony” wherever there were “no national troops,” and the “horrible condition of the freedmen in Alabama,” as a Boston Journal headline put it. The Savannah freedmen’s petition in the summer of 1865 conveyed precisely these kinds of stories, persuasively linking Johnson’s pardoning behavior with the wave of white-on-Black violence coursing through the South. Because Johnson’s actions were undertaken in the context of ongoing use of post-surrender war powers and because they undermined military occupation of the South, his presidency became especially odious to soldiers, veterans, and others well informed of the war effort.
#Colloquy with colored ministers free
White southern men terrorized Black families, declaring them no longer free because Lincoln had died, attacking households and their property in ways wanton and systematic. A former Treasury agent related the story of a pardoned former Confederate soldier who murdered a Black child, shooting him fifty-seven times. Pardoned and paroled Confederate soldiers, in turn, led the wave of violence on Black bodies and souls across the South. Harnessing Article II authorities in new and sweeping ways, he pardoned thousands of former Confederates in the summer and fall of 1865 (at a rate of approximately one hundred per day), quickly installing many of these men at the helm of reconstructed southern state governments. Johnson started provisionally readmitting southern states to the Union, acting on a theory that they had never truly left it (he could not, however, unilaterally admit them to representation in Congress). Johnson’s behavior intertwined with white supremacist violence in the South, so much so that Black women and men, along with white abolitionists, rightly connected the two patterns. Andrew Johnson’s ascension to the American presidency was as accidental as the rise of any preceding executive. In Frederick Douglass’ timeless words, the murder established Lincoln as “the first martyr President of the United States.” Celebrated by southern whites, who saw an opportunity for newly reestablishing racial supremacy and even slavery itself, the event troubled and enraged freedmen and their abolitionist allies alike in the North. The slaying of President Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth in April 1865 shook the continent. It was possibly the first, and certainly the most radical, in a slew of petitions for Johnson’s impeachment that would arrive to Congress between 18. The Savannah freedmen’s prayer reads as part memorial, part indictment list for a capital trial. Having usurped powers not his, having failed to enforce laws passed by Congress, having aided an enemy (and in doing do plausibly committing treason), having encouraged a rebellion, having acted in ways murderous and wicked, Johnson deserved removal at minimum. The offenses alleged against Johnson by Savannah’s Black men were comparable in some sense, and yet far worse in other ways, to those launched by Thomas Jefferson at King George III in 1776. Walking their readers through a list of offenses, interspersing newspaper cuttings freely among their handwritten arguments to provide ready evidence for their claims, referring abundantly to constitutional clauses and to statutes, they laid out the case for President Andrew Johnson’s impeachment. House of Representatives in the autumn of 1865.
“Petition of the Colored Free & Freed Citizens of Savannah, Georgia,” 1865Ī document mixing humility with audacity, at once meticulous yet coursing with rage, the petition of Asa Cotton, James Hewett, Aaron Bradley, William Brown, Ishmael Palmer, and dozens of other men of color from Savannah arrived at the U.S. We charge him with wickedly, & boldly, striving to Reproduce Rebellion, by making Rebel Outlaws Governors, Judges, Sheriffs, Mayors, Clerks and the Police of the Ten Rebel States. We charge him with Usurping Legislative and Judicial power… We charge President Johnson, with giving aid and comfort to Outlaws… We complain of our Chief Executive of causing, by his agents, and Indulgence of Outlaws, much of the Outrages and Murders that have been committed on Loyal Subjects and Citizens of the Union in ten Rebel States since May 29, 1865.
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