Crisis, Movement Activism, and Presidential Resistance

The crisis of the Civil War provided abolitionists with unprecedented opportunities. Abraham Lincoln’s victory in 1860 brought to the executive office for the first time a Republican president who was hostile to the institution of slavery and dedicated to halting its expansion into new territories, itself a partial triumph of abolitionist electioneering. Indeed, abolitionists had been coveting Lincoln’s support since hearing him denounce the Kansas-Nebraska Act at Springfield and Peoria, Illinois, in the fall of 1854. The Springfield address was not published, but Lincoln gave essentially the same speech in Peoria, which he wrote out for a week’s issues of the Illinois State Journal, so that it would be widely read throughout the state. Listening to Lincoln condemn the opening of the Kansas and Nebraska territories to slavery and Stephen Douglas’s doctrine of popular sovereignty in terms that appeared to embrace the principles of the fledgling Republican Party, key abolitionists were encouraged. Owen Lovejoy and Ichabod Codding, both instrumental in the grass-roots movement to form a Republican organization in Illinois, thought they had found a savvy Whig politician who could make their cause effective. Yet Lincoln assumed a cautious position that typified his minuet with antislavery activists for much of the next decade, declining the invitation of Lovejoy and Codding to join the Illinois Republican central committee. “I suppose my opposition to the principle of slavery is as strong as that of any member of the Republican Party,” he wrote Codding, “but I had also supposed that the extent to which I feel authorized to carry that opposition, practically, was not all that satisfactory to the party.”Footnote ¹⁶

Indeed, Lincoln’s famous Peoria address made clear that even as he strongly opposed the Kansas-Nebraska Act’s repeal of the 1820 Missouri Compromise, which would allow slavery to expand above the boundary proscribing slavery in northern portions of the Louisiana Territory, he was no abolitionist. Tellingly, he would not even go so far as to condemn the hated fugitive slave law. Despite the speech’s soaring rhetoric, which Lovejoy and Codding praised as a “glorious abolition speech,” Lincoln’s message was a moderate one that sought to command the fragile center in the polarizing struggle over slavery. He was willing to cooperate with but not join the abolitionist movement or the party that their more moderate wing helped found. “Some men, mostly Whigs, who condemn the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, nevertheless hesitate to call for its restoration, lest they be thrown in company with the abolitionists. Will they allow me as an old whig to tell them good humouredly, that I think this is very silly? . . . Stand WITH the abolitionist in restoring the Missouri Compromise; and stand AGAINST him when he attempts to repeal the fugitive slave law. . . . In both cases you are right. In both cases you oppose the dangerous extremes.”Footnote ¹⁷

Lincoln did not abandon his conservative Whig principles once he finally joined the Republican Party in 1856. Indeed, his relative moderation on the slavery issue helped him wrest his party’s 1860 presidential nomination from the avowedly pro-emancipation William H. Seward, the former governor of New York and the most prominent national Republican leader. Lincoln’s nomination signified that the Republicans’ abolitionist wing did not have a stranglehold on the party. Although Lincoln earned his victory in the general election by sweeping every northern state but New Jersey with 54 percent of the North’s popular vote, his inaugural address reaffirmed his opposition to any efforts “to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it already exists.”Footnote ¹⁸ The new president believed that the “only substantial dispute” was whether slavery could be extended to new territory. Still, Lincoln insisted, as he had since the Peoria address, that this conflict was linked to fundamental principles. “One section of the country believes slavery is right and ought to be extended,” he said, “while the other believes it is wrong and ought not to be extended.” This moral dispute was not a matter that could be settled by “legal right,” despite the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott ruling against congressional limits on slavery in the territories. Rather, it was a matter to be decided by ordinary voters and their representatives. Otherwise, “the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their government into the hands of an eminent tribunal.”Footnote ¹⁹

Some abolitionists were disdainful of Lincoln’s adherence to Whig principles that, at best, prescribed gradual emancipation, but most were more hopeful. Even Garrison, who had harsh words for Republicans, especially the more temperate wing of the party that Lincoln represented, was cautiously optimistic that the 1860 election would advance the abolitionist cause. He argued that Republicans could “create such a moral and religious sentiment against slavery as shall mould all parties and sects to effect its overthrow.” Despite Lincoln’s moderation, Garrison sensed that his party’s ascendance revealed “a marked division between the political forces of the North and the South; and though it relates, ostensibly, solely to the question of the further extension of slavery, it really signifies a much deeper sentiment in the breasts of the people of the North, which, in process of time, must ripen into more decisive action.”Footnote ²⁰

The secession of southern states clearly made decisive action far more likely. As soon as secession became violent and irrevocable, Lincoln believed that his oath of office compelled him to take extraordinary measures, including the suspension of habeas corpus, to preserve the Union. Abolitionists hoped that the president’s grasp of prerogative power to put down the domestic rebellion would include emancipating the slaves. The day after the North’s surrender of Fort Sumter, the White House and Congress were flooded with abolitionist petitions, letters, and personal confrontations demanding immediate emancipation. Radical Republicans were quick to take up the cause of their more fervent brethren. Charles Sumner, representing Massachusetts in the Senate, argued in October 1861 that the Civil War had transformed emancipation into a “weapon” that all true patriots should be eager to deploy: “It is often said that war will make an end of slavery. This is probable. But it is surer still that the overthrow of Slavery will make an end of the war. . . . War must be brought to bear directly on the grand conspirator and omnipresent enemy. Not to do so is to take upon ourselves all the weakness of Slavery, while we leave the Rebels its boasted resources of military strength.”Footnote ²¹

But Lincoln was slow to accept the necessity of abolishing slavery by executive action. On July 4, 1861, the president once again assured the nation that he had no intention to disturb slavery in the states; three weeks later he told Congress that “this war is not waged . . . for any purpose . . . of overthrowing or interfering with the rights or established institutions of . . . Southern states.”Footnote ²² Indeed, Lincoln feared that an emancipation edict would weaken the Union by alienating the Border States. He revoked General John C. Fremont’s emancipation order, issued in August 1861, which confiscated the property and freed the slaves of all Confederate activists in Missouri. Lincoln’s slap-down of Fremont, the crusading standard bearer of the Republican Party in the 1856 presidential election, was unpopular with most Republicans.

“Astonished” that even moderate Republicans like Orville Browning were now urging such an extraordinary use of executive power, Lincoln insisted that Fremont’s proclamation was “simply dictatorship.” It assumed that the general could “do anything he pleases—confiscate the lands and free the slaves of loyal people, as well as disloyal ones.” Rather than save the government, Lincoln insisted, actions like Fremont’s would signify the surrender of it: “Can it be pretended that it is any longer the government of the U.S.—any government of Constitution and laws—wherein a General, or a President, may make permanent rules of property by proclamation?” Compounding this perversion of principle, Lincoln feared, was that it was likely to fail as a policy. “I was assured,” Lincoln informed Browning, “that [letting Fremont’s order stand meant that] the very arms we had furnished Kentucky would be turned against us. I think to lose Kentucky is nearly the same as to lose the whole game. Kentucky gone, we cannot hold Missouri, nor, I think, Maryland.” Invoking the carefully modulated pledge their party had made in 1860—to prevent the expansion of slavery, and no more—Lincoln pleaded with his old friend to give up his “restlessness for new positions.”Footnote ²³

Lincoln’s invocation of the Republican platform was not disingenuous. Holding firmly to its pledge, he rejected Seward’s importunities immediately after the 1860 election that, while still the president-elect, he seek a compromise on the extension of slavery into the territories. When word leaked that Congress was considering a plan presented by Senator John J. Crittenden of Kentucky that would accept the expansion of slavery south of the Missouri Compromise’s 36/30 line, Lincoln intervened to defeat it. To surrender under threat that which Lincoln defined as the Republican bedrock would have been disastrous not only for his party but also for American democracy. His fellow Republicans in Congress agreed. Despite Seward’s talk of a negotiated settlement, not a single Republican in Congress voted for the Crittenden Plan. Moreover, Lincoln’s moral aversion to slavery and his eagerness to assuage moderate abolitionists in Congress led him to distance himself from the proslavery positions of earlier presidents. In defiance of the Dred Scott decision, Lincoln signed legislation barring slavery from all the national territories. He also supported a new treaty with Great Britain aimed at better attacking the Atlantic slave trade, and, at the urging of Senator Sumner, he refused to commute the death sentence of the first American convicted of participating in the slave trade. Even as he took these measures, Lincoln remained unwilling to endorse “radical and extreme measures.” Nonetheless, as the president acknowledged in defending his slouch toward emancipation, “I claim not to control events, but confess that events have controlled me.”Footnote ²⁴ Undaunted by Lincoln’s unyielding defense of the “middle ground,” militant and moderate abolitionists pressed strongly for a decidedly bolder course. In the end, Lincoln was persuaded to lend critical support to their cause.

Radical Agitation and Collective Responsibility

Movement radicals launched provocative publicity campaigns and rallies meant to unravel Lincoln’s gradualism. In November 1861, an Emancipation League was formed by Phillips, Garrison, and Frederick Douglass to coordinate a vigorous publicity campaign of public speeches, writings, and demonstrations aimed at “urging upon the people and the Government emancipation of the Slaves, as a measure of justice, and military necessity.”Footnote ²⁵ Garrisonian abolitionists saw their militancy as playing a critical role. “I do not believe that [Lincoln] has the boldness to declare an emancipation policy, until, by a pressure which we are to create, the country forces him to do it,” Phillips reasoned. “I must educate, arouse, and mature a public opinion which shall compel the administration to adopt and support [abolition]. . . . My criticism is not, like that of the traitor presses, meant to paralyze the administration, but to goad it to more activity and vigor.”Footnote ²⁶ These efforts drew unprecedented attention. The New York Tribune estimated that during the winter and spring of 1861–62 more than 5 million people heard or read antislavery speeches of Phillips and other Emancipation League agitators.Footnote ²⁷ “Keep pounding the rock,” Douglass urged his colleagues, while his own speeches assailed Lincoln’s “vacillation, doubt, uncertainty, and hesitation.”Footnote ²⁸ The League was not alone in its efforts to instigate change. The White House also was beleaguered from a steady stream of antislavery petitions, letters, and delegations.Footnote ²⁹

Yet this deluge was mediated in critical ways by the Republican Party, which lent authority and effective organization to the abolitionist cause. Moderate abolitionists at the center of power recognized the moral and practical strains that these publicity and protest activities placed on Lincoln, and they sought to capitalize on them in two ways. First, reform-minded lawmakers and cabinet members, most notably Senator Sumner, conferred with the president several times a week on how to address both abolitionist demands and the moral obligations to end slavery.Footnote ³⁰ Sumner and others also gave more respected voice to militant arguments that freeing slaves served an immediate military purpose. Second, abolitionists in Congress (including prominent members of the influential joint congressional Committee on the Conduct of the War) worked to force the president’s hand amid the constant drumbeat of external abolitionist criticism.Footnote ³¹

The Radical Republicans’ commitment to pushing Lincoln toward emancipation was especially evident in how Congress addressed the issue of thousands of slaves who fled behind the lines of Union armies in pursuit of freedom. Some Union officers followed the Fugitive Slave Act and permitted slave masters to reclaim these fugitives, while others refused to return the slaves on the grounds that they were contrabands of war. Lincoln made no public comment on the subject in the summer of 1861, but he privately resolved that these fugitives ought not to be returned to bondage.Footnote ³² Still, he faced a nettlesome dilemma: most people living in the Border States crucial to the Union cause supported the return of these fugitives and those in northern states resisted the resettlement of large numbers of freed slaves in their territory.Footnote ³³ As the White House responded slowly, movement allies in Congress seized the initiative. When numerous fugitive slaves sought haven at a Union fort in Virginia, abolitionists in Congress persuaded their colleagues to adopt a Confiscation Act in the summer of 1861 that allowed Union forces to seize all property used to aid the Confederacy. The measure was carefully designed to provide relief for fugitive slaves behind Union lines. Lincoln reluctantly signed the legislation.Footnote ³⁴ The law fell far short of the ringing endorsement that Phillips and Douglass were championing—the contrabands were no longer slaves only if they had been employed directly by the Confederate army—but it was too strong for Democrats and a few border-state Republicans. As James McPherson has noted, “This was the first breach of bipartisan support for Union measures.” More to the point, it marked a critical turning point, signifying that “the conflict was being transformed into a Republican and antislavery war.”Footnote ³⁵

Such a development worried Lincoln, especially as he feared it encouraged Fremont’s edict, which went well beyond the letter of the law. Even as the pressure for emancipation grew in the spring of 1862, Lincoln continued to prescribe gradualism. Although expressing sympathy with the objective of the Religious Society of Progressive Friends, a Pennsylvania abolitionist society that met with him in June 1862, Lincoln made clear that he was not yet prepared to embrace the method they and their radical Republican allies proposed to fulfill it. “If a decree of emancipation could abolish Slavery,” he told his visitors, “John Brown would have done the work effectually.”Footnote ³⁶

To resolve the puzzle of what to do with fugitive slaves who escaped into Union encampments, Lincoln considered colonization but eventually developed an emancipation plan intended to address abolitionist demands for dismantling slavery without alienating the majority of citizens in both border and northern states. Unveiled in his annual message to Congress in December 1861, Lincoln’s proposal called for abolition to be voluntary on the part of loyal slave states, for compensation to be made to the slave owners, and for freed slaves to be colonized.Footnote ³⁷ It was meant to be a compromise plan that spoke to abolitionist demands. “If the President has not entered Canaan,” Phillips observed, “he has turned his face Zionward.”Footnote ³⁸ Lincoln’s careful designs for compensated emancipation ultimately went nowhere as none of the loyal slave states agreed to the plan. But his efforts speak to abolitionist influence both inside and outside the councils of government, with the Republican Party playing an important role in reconciling insurgency and executive power.

The Final Push: Sustained Pressure and Executive Action

Early in 1862, the abolitionist leaders of the Emancipation League noted a significant change in how northern audiences greeted their fiery demands for immediate emancipation. Douglass marveled that earlier jeers and mob violence against abolitionist speeches had been replaced by hearty applause and cheers from packed audiences, but he was quite certain that the change in public sentiment was driven by the belief that abolition would hasten Union victory rather than any faith in racial justice.Footnote ³⁹ Following Sumner, abolitionists also grew adroit at framing the abolition of slavery as consistent with Lincoln’s self-proclaimed duty to do whatever was necessary to preserve the Union. Militant abolitionists, too, began to take greater care to cast emancipation as a crucial war measure in line with two executive and popular goals: swift victory and enduring peace. “We are fighting the rebels with only one hand,” Douglass told an enthusiastic audience in Philadelphia. “We are recruiting our troops in the towns and villages of the North, when we ought to be recruiting them on the plantations of the South. We are striking the guilty rebels with our soft white hand, when we should be striking with the iron hand of the black man, which we keep chained behind us.”Footnote ⁴⁰ As another movement leader put it in more strategic terms, an emancipation order by the president “would compel every fighting [Confederate] man to remain at home and look to their negroes instead of going into the army to kill our friends.”Footnote ⁴¹

In March, Phillips brought his rhetorical campaign directly to Washington, where “he took the town by storm.” Phillips’s celebrity as an eloquent agitator led Lincoln to grant him an interview, during which he counseled the president on his moral duty to liberate slaves. While militants like Phillips were gaining mainstream appeal and recasting northern views, Sumner and other abolitionist insiders advanced the League’s arguments through private lobbying and public action. Radicals derailed readoption of the so-called Crittenden-Johnson Resolution that originally disavowed the abolition of slavery as a central war aim of the Union. They subsequently won passage of an article of war prohibiting U.S. troops from returning fugitive slaves to slaveholders, followed by legislation in April 1862 that abolished slavery in the District of Columbia.

By the summer of 1862, the Republican Party was united in the view that Lincoln and the military should take all action, including emancipation, to put down the rebellion. Even moderate Republicans supported the enactment of two laws that made all but inevitable the link between restoration of the Union and emancipation. The Militia Act not only drafted soldiers for a nine-month tour of duty but also empowered the president to enroll “persons of African descent” for any “war service for which they may be found competent,” including service as soldiers, a step that Lincoln was not yet prepared to take.Footnote ⁴² This revolutionary provision was underlined with Congress’s enactment of a second Confiscation Act, which punished “traitors” by confiscating their property, including slaves who were “deemed captives of war . . . and forever free.”Footnote ⁴³

Lincoln had deep reservations about the sweeping powers the second Confiscation Act bestowed on the military; he signed the legislation, but took the extraordinary step of sending back to Congress a draft veto message that detailed his concerns about its failure to clearly stipulate the meaning of treason and to distinguish between confederates’ real property and slaves. Nevertheless, recognizing that to resist the rising sentiment for abolition would unite his partisan brethren in Congress against him, Lincoln not only signed the Confiscation Act but also made no effort to resist the pressure that the Committee on the Conduct of War put on generals to aggressively enforce it.Footnote ⁴⁴

Spurred by the radicals of his party and frustrated by the border-state’s adamant rejection of his plan for compensated emancipation, Lincoln finally tilted toward the abolitionist position. He privately consulted with various confidantes, including moderate abolitionists, about issuing an emancipation proclamation as a military measure liberating slaves behind Confederate lines. A draft of a proclamation was soon prepared and locked in his desk drawer. When Sumner persistently urged Lincoln to issue the proclamation, the president firmly explained, “We mustn’t issue it till after a victory.” To begin preparing northern sentiment for such an order, he resuscitated his colonization proposal as a way of assuaging popular fears that emancipation would lead freed slaves to resettle en masse in northern states.Footnote ⁴⁵ He also issued his famous public response to Horace Greeley’s New York editorial, titled “The Prayer of Twenty Millions,” which criticized the president’s lethargy on emancipation. Lincoln’s open letter clarified what he saw as his official obligation to subordinate the slavery question to preserving the Union, although this duty represented “no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men everywhere could be free.”Footnote ⁴⁶ His open letter was designed to reassure northerners “who did not want to see the war transformed into a crusade for abolition” and alert “antislavery men that he was contemplating further moves against the peculiar institution.”Footnote ⁴⁷

When military victory finally came at Antietam in September, Lincoln issued a “Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation” followed by a permanent proclamation a few months later. The centerpiece of the executive order was its declaration of presidential intent to emancipate all slaves in areas failing to return to the Union by January 1, 1863. Using language consistent with his constitutional role as commander-in-chief, Lincoln defined emancipation in terms of military imperative; the proclamation was to be applied essentially in unconquered sections of the Confederacy. Slaves also were described in martial terms as commodities of war; their freedom was “not a question of sentiment or taste, but one of physical force, which may be preserved and estimated as horsepower, and steampower, are measured and estimated.”Footnote ⁴⁸

Despite the limited scope of the proclamation’s language and spirit, abolitionists regarded it as a tremendous breakthrough: Lincoln had finally made the connection between abolitionism and military necessity that they had been urging on him since the start of the war. “We shout for joy that we live to record this righteous decree,” Douglass proclaimed. Greeley hailed the president’s order as “the beginning of the new life of the nation,” and Garrison described it as “an act of immense historic importance.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Indeed, abolitionists played an important part in recruiting black soldiers. Douglass was especially active in this cause, helping to recruit the Massachusetts 54th Infantry, the first regiment of northern blacks, which his sons, Lewis and Charles, joined.Footnote ⁵⁰

Fortified by wide reports that black soldiers took full advantage of this opportunity for honor, both militant and moderate antislavery leaders soon urged more sweeping emancipation. Throughout his presidency, Lincoln insisted that full emancipation of slaves could only be achieved by constitutional amendment, and not by executive fiat. Nor could the slaves be freed by regular legislation. To the chagrin of Radical Republicans, he vetoed the 1864 Wade-Davis Bill, which included the sort of comprehensive emancipation and Reconstruction measures that he still believed the federal government had no constitutional right to impose on the states. At the same time, Lincoln made clear that he had moved significantly in the abolitionist direction. He conceded that it was unthinkable to return blacks to slavery, especially since African American soldiers performed as bravely and effectively as abolitionists had told a skeptical president they would. When some northern Democrats argued that permanent emancipation was the only stumbling block to peace negotiations with the Confederacy, Lincoln countered that “as a matter of policy, to announce such a purpose, would ruin the Union cause itself.”Footnote ⁵¹

As he made clear at Gettysburg, Lincoln had come to sense a historic opportunity to join abolitionists in assuring that the “nation, under God, [would] have a new birth of freedom.” Supported by the radical members of his party, the president persuaded the chairman of the Republican National Committee, New York Senator E. D. Morgan, to make an emancipation amendment the “key-stone” of the 1864 campaign platform. Because slavery was “hostile to the principles of republican government, justice and national safety,” the platform declared, the Republican Party vowed to accomplish its “utter and complete extirpation from the soil of the Republic.”Footnote ⁵² The president also showed his resolve by plotting with Frederick Douglass in August 1864 to free the slaves from the Confederacy should the Republicans, as he thought probable, lose the election and thus any opportunity to end forced servitude constitutionally.Footnote ⁵³ The Democratic candidate, the reluctant General McClellan, although he disavowed his party’s “peace before reunion” plank, opposed the Emancipation Proclamation and wanted the Union to continue fighting only until the presecession status quo could be restored.Footnote ⁵⁴

In the end, a spirited Republican campaign and the timely capture of Atlanta turned the tide in the Republicans’ favor. Reelected by large majorities, Lincoln and GOP leaders persuaded Congress to propose by the necessary two-thirds majority to end slavery everywhere in the United States. The president played a critical part in the complicated congressional maneuvers, “intervening more directly in the legislative process than at any other point in his presidency.”Footnote ⁵⁵ More than three decades after Garrison founded the AASS, the complete abolition of slavery finally was achieved with congressional passage and ultimate ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865. Yet this grand accomplishment also owed significantly to a Whig politician who first reluctantly, but later decisively, formed an alliance with a social movement. Once the House and Senate had passed the amendment, Congress sent it to Lincoln for his signature. The Constitution does not require presidents to sign constitutional amendments, but legislative leaders somehow forgot that Lincoln’s was not needed.Footnote ⁵⁶ This oversight, whether deliberate or not, testifies to the important role that the president played in persuading the Congress and the people to embrace constitutional change—as he put it, “a King’s ransom for all the evils.”Footnote ⁵⁷ As Douglass observed in his famous 1876 oration upon the occasion of the dedication of the Freedmen’s Monument, “Viewed from genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined.”Footnote ⁵⁸

Douglass aptly highlighted the competing pressures to which Lincoln was subjected and the importance of his efforts to prepare public opinion. The form, substance, and timing of sweeping emancipation was ultimately a shared, albeit contentious, leadership enterprise. Militants kept abolitionism before the nation and ultimately played a critical part in reshaping public debate over slavery during the war. Sumner and other abolitionist “insiders” capitalized on the political strains and ideas posed by militants, but reframed them in congressional legislation and private deliberations at the White House. But Lincoln’s strategic choices and actions in his exercise of executive powers were also integral to winning large-scale change.

The Limits of Constitutional Change

In the final analysis, the relationship between Lincoln and the abolitionists was sealed on the basis of the birth and rise to power of a new party. Firmly united in its commitment to emancipation, sanctified by a popular election and Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, the Republicans added two more amendments to the Constitution after Lincoln’s death. The Thirteenth Amendment transformed America’s scripture, the Declaration of Independence, into a formal constitutional obligation. That obligation was further extended by the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, which granted all Americans the “privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States,” “due process,” and “equal protection of the laws.” The Fifteenth Amendment, added in 1870, proclaimed the “right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be abridged by the United States or any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

The three Civil War amendments changed the course of constitutional development and expanded government’s obligation to protect the rights of the common citizen. President Ulysses S. Grant, elevated to the White House in 1868, declared in his March 1870 message to Congress that the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment “completes the greatest civil change and constitutes the most important event that has occurred since the nation came to life.”Footnote ⁵⁹ This was not merely rhetorical flourish: Grant was determined to deploy the military government in the South to enforce the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and to protect freedmen from the violent backlash of the Ku Klux Klan. African Americans jubilantly celebrated, hoping with Douglass that the amendment ratification “means that we are placed on an equal footing with all other men . . . and that liberty is to be the right of all.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Indeed, a number of former abolitionist groups disbanded on the assumption that now, finally, their work was done.

But these hopes would be bitterly dashed. The political order that Lincoln and the Republican Party formed imposed limits on presidential power and the constitutional transformation promised by the Civil War Refounding. Even in the war, Lincoln did not forsake entirely the Whig view of executive power that he had celebrated in the Peoria address. Consistent with this view, which most Republicans—radical and moderate—embraced, Lincoln denied that the president could veto bills merely because he disagreed with them; only legislation, like the Wade-Davis bill, that he regarded as unconstitutional would be returned to Congress.Footnote ⁶¹ Despite serious reservations, he signed the Confiscation Acts; moreover, the president deferred almost entirely to Congress on matters unrelated to the war, “contributing little more than his signature” when Republican lawmakers “created a Department of Agriculture, established land grant colleges, passed the Homestead Act [to encourage western settlement], instituted the income tax, and erected the legislative framework that would lead to the construction of a transcontinental railroad.”Footnote ⁶²

Dedicated to Whig principles, Lincoln did not believe that emancipation would secure black rights quickly. His celebrated second inaugural both invoked a divine mandate to expurgate the sin of slavery and an appeal to pursue God’s will mercifully—”with malice toward none; with charity for all.” Hoping to moderate the Radicals’ bold plans to remake the South, he sought to realize the constitutional revolution in a lenient fashion, preferring to address the prejudices of Americans with persuasion rather than force. Lincoln’s assassination, and his bigoted successor, Andrew Johnson, severely limited the Republicans’ constitutional legacy. But the failure of Reconstruction was also attributable to the party’s principled opposition to executive power—to most Republicans’ diffidence in the task of strengthening national administrative authority. In the face of Johnson’s betrayal of the Republicans’ commitment to civil rights, the party set out to diminish rather than reconstruct executive power. As Sumner insisted, the Constitution made the president “only the instrument of Congress.” The impeachment and near conviction of Johnson, therefore, reversed the expansion of executive power during the Civil War and the early days of reconstruction and redefined the presidency as “primarily ministerial.”Footnote ⁶³ What Sumner and his radical brethren failed to acknowledge, however, was that their indifference, indeed avowed hostility to national administrative power, would ultimately make the expansive government power they prescribed impractical.

The Republicans’ fear of centralized power formed a critical backdrop to the notorious “Compromise of 1877,” which settled the controversial 1876 presidential election in favor of Republican Rutherford B. Hayes. Hayes, in turn, removed the federal troops from the South, thus putting an end to virtually all attempts to enforce the rights of former slaves. “More profoundly than Constitutional amendments and wordy statutes,” C. Van Woodward has written, this unsavory bargain “shaped the future of four million freedman and their progeny for generations to come.”Footnote ⁶⁴ In truth, the negotiations between Democrats and Republicans that led to the 1877 agreement had stretched over several months. Prompted by the Democrats regaining control of the House in 1874 and the waning power of the military occupation, Grant had maintained a “benevolent neutrality” during the last three months of his administration that enabled to so-called Redeemers of South Carolina and Louisiana to take de facto control over the two remaining Republican governments below the Mason Dixon Line. In the final analysis, the military, especially one that was small and widely scattered, was no substitute for a national bureaucracy: military personnel were not trained for such work, and military government proved impossible for democratically elected representatives to defend.Footnote ⁶⁵

Putting an end to Reconstruction and recognizing a new regime in the South, the Compromise of 1877 paved the way for white majorities in southern states to enact Jim Crow laws, a system of forced segregation that prevented enforcement of the Fourteenth and Fifteen Amendments and that denied African Americans a full share of American citizenship for nearly a century. The Civil War and its aftermath had firmly ensconced the Republicans as the majority party, but this partisan realignment did not prevent a debased form of local self-determination—“a state of courts and parties”—from returning to American politics. This decentralized party state would severely constrain presidential authority for the rest of the nineteenth century, so much so that the self-styled modern reformers who emerged during the 1890s overwhelmingly viewed partisan politics as an obstacle to their ambition to construct an executive-centered “modern” state on American soil.

Seizing the Moment: Lyndon Johnson and the Politics of Race

When Johnson assumed the presidency, he had instrumental reasons for taking a strong civil rights stand. By this time, the Solid South was no more, as Eisenhower and Nixon had won substantial support below the Mason-Dixon Line. The best hope for establishing an executive-centered liberal coalition lay in expanding the black vote. Black voters were suspicious of a southern president, as were many northern liberals who had become strongly committed to the civil rights cause after the demonstrations in Birmingham, Alabama, and the March on Washington in 1963. Johnson felt the need to prove himself to the growing civil rights movement by carrying out—indeed surpassing—the civil rights program of the Kennedy administration.Footnote ⁷⁰

Equally important, Johnson wanted to make his own historic mark on the presidency and he viewed civil rights reform and an alliance with the leaders of the civil rights movement as critical to the success of the Great Society. In the view of Johnson and aides like Richard Goodwin and Bill Moyers, the social movements that emerged in the 1960s suggested that ideas and practices that were marginal during the Progressive Era and New Deal might become the foundation of a new reform program. “Johnson intended to align himself with the cause of blacks and women and consumers,” Goodwin has claimed, “and he saw their causes as evidence that the country was ready for leadership committed to social change.” In the civil rights movement especially, the Johnson administration saw “not only the power and possibility of organized protests, but the unsuspected fragility in America to liberating changes.”Footnote ⁷¹

Viewing the growing civil rights movement as an opportunity for the White House to forge a new reform coalition, Johnson was scornful of the Kennedy administration’s cautious moves toward new federal intervention, even as it pushed unsuccessfully for a major civil rights bill in 1963.Footnote ⁷² He intended to fully deploy the White House in fulfilling his reform ambition, and few presidents had broader political opportunities or executive powers at their disposal.Footnote ⁷³ Never recognized for his rhetorical ability, LBJ even made surprising use of the bully pulpit. The president delivered speeches in Georgia during May 1964 that appeared to defy his reputation as an unprincipled power broker. In a notable address to the state legislature, he declared unequivocally that the time had come for “justice among the races.” Johnson insisted that he would never feel that he had done justice to his “high office”—the national constitutional office—so long as those old hatreds continued to rend the country. This constitutional responsibility presupposed searing the American creed, and how racial discrimination tarnished it, into the national consciousness. “Georgians helped write the Constitution. Georgians have fought and Georgians had died to protect that Constitution,” he observed in a calm but firm tone. “Because the Constitution requires it, because justice demands it, we must protect the constitutional rights of all of our citizens, regardless of race, religion, or the color of their skin.”Footnote ⁷⁴

Johnson’s resolve to take the civil rights fight into the Deep South reverberated far beyond Georgia’s borders. In going before the legislature of a southern state to make an unflinching statement on civil rights, he gained the hard-won respect of northern liberals and civil rights leaders. It was “becoming of the President of the United States,” a Washington Post editorial declared, that he should make such a “forthright statement” below the Mason-Dixon Line. Johnson’s words were not novel; he and other presidents had said as much before. “But said in this setting,” the Post recognized, “the words have special impact, special meaning. They throw down the gauntlet of a challenge: they say to the South—in part because they are spoken by a President of the United States who is himself a Southerner—‘Remember that you are Americans; remember that you belong to a Union, not a confederacy.’”Footnote ⁷⁵

Johnson’s remarkable and widely praised trip to Georgia strengthened his resolve to see civil rights legislation enacted that would dismantle the Jim Crow system. Martin Luther King, who had met LBJ during his tenure as vice president and quickly sized him up as a valuable ally, recognized the importance of the president’s early and earnest advocacy of civil rights: “[Lyndon Johnson’s] approach to civil rights was not identical with mine—nor had I expected it to be. Yet his careful practicality was nonetheless clearly no mask to conceal indifference. His emotional and intellectual involvement was genuine and devoid of adornment. . . . It was Vice President Johnson I had in mind when I wrote in The Nation that the white South was splitting, and that progress could be furthered by driving a wedge between the rigid segregationists and the new white elements whose love of their land was stronger than the grip of old habits and customs.”Footnote ⁷⁶ For a time, LBJ’s “careful practicality” and moral leadership made him an indispensable ally of the civil rights movement. His greatest strength as Senate Majority Leader had been personal persuasion, a talent he now used to convince the Senate Republican leader, Everett Dirksen, to endorse the 1964 Civil Rights Bill and enlist moderate Republicans in the cause. This support did not come without a price. Dirksen insisted on compromises that reduced the power of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and limited the authority of the Justice Department to bring suits against businesses to those situations in which a clear “pattern and practice” of discrimination existed.Footnote ⁷⁷ These compromises responded to moderate Republicans’ distaste for overlapping bureaucracies and excessive litigation, as well as their desire to protect northern and western businesses from intrusive federal agencies. Still, the principal objective of the Civil Rights Bill—eliminating entrenched segregation in the South—was preserved.

Dirksen’s support of the Civil Rights Bill also followed from the senator’s perception, confirmed by the president’s successful southern tour, that public opinion’s support for civil rights was building in the country.Footnote ⁷⁸ The bipartisan alliance of Johnson and Dirksen sounded the death knell for the conservative coalition of southern Democrats and Republicans against civil rights. For the first time, the Senate voted cloture against a southern filibuster designed to thwart a civil rights bill and did so by a considerable margin of seventy-one to twenty-nine. Once the filibuster was killed, Congress passed the bill quickly, and Johnson signed it on July 2, 1964. Throughout the fight for this legislation, Johnson drew strength from and collaborated with civil rights leaders, even seeking their support on which day he should sign the bill.Footnote ⁷⁹

More controversially, most civil rights leaders accepted the compromise that the Johnson White House struck with Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) at the 1964 Democratic Convention, albeit not without a great “sense of distress.”Footnote ⁸⁰ The compromise plan included the seating of the regular Mississippi delegation, provided its members signed a loyalty oath that pledged them to support the presidential ticket; the symbolic gesture of making MFDP delegates honored guests at the convention, with two of its members seated as special delegates at large; and a prohibition of racial discrimination in delegate selection at the 1968 convention, to be enforced by a special committee to assist state parties in complying with this expectation. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Committee of Racial Equality (CORE) scorned the White House’s willingness to sacrifice the MFDP’s moral cause on the altar of expediency. But the MFDP, through its lawyer John Rauh, joined King and most moderate civil rights leaders in swallowing the compromise.Footnote ⁸¹ Not only were southern states threatening to walk out of the convention if the regular Mississippi delegation was purged, but Johnson and Democratic leaders also warned civil rights leaders that an unruly convention would cost the party the support of several border states and deprive Democrats of a chance to win a historic landslide—and a mandate for further reform.Footnote ⁸²

Just as important, LBJ helped to diffuse the Mississippi controversy by championing a fundamental reform of convention rules that would have enormous long-term consequences for the Democratic Party. Previously, state parties had sole authority to establish delegate selection procedures. Johnson’s proposed solution to the MFDP compromise established the centralizing principle that henceforth the national party agencies would decide not only how many votes each state delegation got at the national convention but also would enforce uniform rules on what kinds of persons could be selected. As the president told Reuther, “We don’t want to cut off our nose to spite our face. If they [MFDP protesters] give us four years, I’ll guarantee the Freedom delegation somebody representing views like that will be seated four years from now.”Footnote ⁸³ Moreover, LBJ made it clear to all parties—civil rights reformers and regular southern delegates alike—that he did not propose this compromise merely as a short-term, stopgap measure to ensure peace at the 1964 convention. Rather, he viewed the new nondiscrimination rule as a justified extension of the national party’s power over state delegations that carried on discriminatory practices. As Humphrey confirmed with Johnson in a telephone conversation soon after the compromise plan was accepted, the MFDP representatives should “be heralded not as delegates from the state of Mississippi,” but, rather, “as an expression of the conscience of the Democratic party, as to the importance of the right to vote . . . by all peoples in this country.”Footnote ⁸⁴

Having gained credibility with civil rights leaders during the first critical year of his presidency, Johnson directly coordinated with them during the dramatic prelude to the enactment of the 1965 voting rights legislation, which would enfranchise millions of African Americans. New archival materials cut against the received wisdom that the White House wanted to go slow after the 1964 act. Indeed, LBJ not only pushed aggressively to continue the advance of civil rights but even seemed to welcome the movement’s ability to disrupt politics-as-usual and to spur action. On January 15, 1965, for instance, Johnson urged King and the grass-roots organization he led to put pressure on Congress by dramatizing “the worst conditions [of blacks being denied the vote] that you can run into. . . . If you can take that one illustration and get it on the radio, get on the television, get it in the pulpits, get it in the meetings—every place you can—then pretty soon the fellow who didn’t do anything but drive a tractor would say, ‘Well, that is not right—that is not fair.’”Footnote ⁸⁵

In the days that followed, King and movement activists took direct action in Selma that aroused massive resistance from local police and state troopers, as well as national demonstrations in support of the marchers. When King sought his public endorsement of the Selma campaign, Johnson championed the demonstrators’ cause despite the efforts of White House aides to shield him from public involvement in the crisis. “I should like to say that all Americans should be indignant when one American is denied the right to vote . . . all of us should be concerned with the efforts of our fellow Americans to register to vote in Alabama,” Johnson said. “I intend to see that the right is secured for all our citizens.”Footnote ⁸⁶

The following month, as the crisis in Selma worsened, Johnson lived up to this promise. On March 15, 1965, for the first time in nineteen years, a president appeared before a joint session of Congress to present a legislative message. Sensing that America was at a pivotal moment in its long and tortured history of slavery and discrimination, hoping to seize the opportunity presented by the brave civil rights demonstrators, Johnson spoke with unusual feeling about the Voting Rights Act:

Johnson thus adopted as his own rallying cry a line from an old hymn that had become the slogan of the civil rights movement. LBJ did not win over southern congressmen, most of whom slumped in their seats as the joint session erupted in applause. Yet he had triumphed where FDR failed. Without embroiling himself in an enervating purge campaign against conservative Democrats, as Roosevelt had in 1938, he joined civil rights activists to discredit southern resistance to liberal reform.Footnote ⁸⁸ King, watching the speech on television in Montgomery, Alabama, was moved to tears. As he wrote of the historical address, “President Johnson made one of the most eloquent, unequivocal, and passionate pleas for human rights ever made by a President of the United States. He revealed an amazing understanding of the depth and dimension of the problem of racial justice. . . . We had the support of the President in calling for immediate relief of the problems of the disinherited people of our nation.”Footnote ⁸⁹ Even the more skeptical John Lewis, then president of SNCC, acknowledged that on this night LBJ was “a man who spoke from his heart, a statesman, a poet.”Footnote ⁹⁰

Yet tensions within the civil rights movement threatened to sever its critical but uneasy ties with his White House. Indeed, in contrast to moderate civil rights leaders, more radical insurgents scorned White House leadership and their views increasingly gained a hold over the movement. Moderate abolitionists, such as Charles Sumner, gained prestige and authority as “radical” leaders of a new party; on the contrary, more practical civil rights activists like King sacrificed a measure of moral authority in forging direct ties with a president their more militant brethren deeply distrusted. For activists like James Foreman, the field secretary for SNCC, Johnson’s voting-rights sermon, coming on the heels of his maneuvers at the 1964 Democratic Convention, was little more than a “tinkling, empty symbol.” As he told reporters, “Johnson spoiled a good song that day.”Footnote ⁹¹

Social Protest and Limits of White House Leverage

Toward the end of 1965, the energy and resources committed to the Great Society began to suffer, threatened by Johnson’s preoccupation with the Vietnam War. The war also fatally wounded his relationship with the civil rights movement.Footnote ⁹² Even moderate civil rights leaders like King became visible participants in the antiwar movement. Many abolitionists welcomed the Civil War as a boon to their cause; King saw the Vietnam War not only as morally indefensible but also as a growing commitment that would divert resources needed to address problems of poverty at home. As the schisms in the civil rights movement deepened along with the administration’s involvement in Vietnam, Johnson became the target rather than the ally of civil rights activists.

In late November, White House aide Hayes Redmon lamented the antiwar efforts of civil rights activists. “I am increasingly concerned over the involvement of civil rights groups with anti-war demonstrators,” he wrote in a memo to Bill Moyers. “The anti-Vietnam types are driving the middle class to the right. This is the key group that is slowly being won over to the civil rights cause. Negro leadership involvement with anti-Vietnam groups will set their programs back substantially.”Footnote ⁹³ King’s opposition, especially, which he voiced publicly in September 1965, angered Johnson and exposed the inherent conflict between the interests of the president and the civil rights movement. Like Kennedy, Johnson deferred to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover’s use of telephone wiretaps and hotel room microphones to discredit King on national security grounds; like Kennedy, too, he took seriously Hoover’s ill-founded warning that Communists had infiltrated the civil rights movement.Footnote ⁹⁴

Johnson had tried to renew ties with King a few weeks before the civil rights leader publicly voiced opposition to his administration. In August, soon after race riots broke out in Watts, he called the civil rights leader to express his continued support for civil rights and to question him about rumors that he was opposed to the administration’s actions in Vietnam.Footnote ⁹⁵ Trying in vain to meet the demands of spiraling civil rights militancy, the president urged King to take seriously and to help publicize a commencement address the president had given on June 4 at Howard University.Footnote ⁹⁶ The speech proclaimed that “freedom was not enough” and that the time had come to “seek . . . not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and as a result.” LBJ told King that it demonstrated his administration’s commitment to address the most stubborn forces sustaining racial inequality.Footnote ⁹⁷ The Howard address was arguably the boldest rhetorical presidential challenge to racial injustice since Lincoln’s Second Inaugural. And yet, as the president complained, civil rights activists had in large part greeted it with a deafening silence. Johnson also urged the civil rights leader to support the administration on Vietnam, telling King: “I want peace as much as you do if not more so,” because “I’m the fellow who had to wake up to 50 marines killed.”Footnote ⁹⁸

King acknowledged that Johnson’s Howard University speech was “the best statement and analysis of the problem” he had seen and that “no president ever said it like that before.”Footnote ⁹⁹ Indeed, he had saluted the president by wire soon after it was delivered “for your magnificent speech . . . [that] evinced amazing sensitivity.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Nonetheless, King and other movement leaders refused to lavish praise on the Howard University Address, concerned that associating too closely with Johnson might weaken their standing in the civil rights community. As David Carter has written, “In this period of growing polarization it had become increasingly clear to civil rights leaders, and ultimately even to the President and his staff, that a White House blessing of a leader was tantamount to a curse.”Footnote ¹⁰¹

In truth, King was the least of the administration’s problems. As the civil rights movement trained its eye on the poverty-stricken ghettos of large northern cities, King lost influence to more militant leaders who were better attuned than he to the frustrations and rage of young urban blacks.Footnote ¹⁰² “Black power” advocates like Stokely Carmichael, newly elected head of SNCC, and Floyd McKissick, of CORE, were not only dissatisfied with the achievements of Johnson’s civil rights program, but they also were contemptuous of its objective of racial integration. As Carmichael and political scientist Charles Hamilton wrote in Black Power, a manifesto for the ascending militancy of the civil rights movement: “The goal of the black people must not be to assimilate into middle class America, for that class—as a whole—is without a viable conscience as regards humanity. . . . The values of that class do not lead to the creation of an open society. That class mouths its preference for a free, competitive society, while at the same time forcefully and even viciously denying the black people as a group the opportunity to compete.”Footnote ¹⁰³ The growing militancy of black America erupted during the summer of 1966 as urban riots swept across the nation. In the wake of these developments, the moderately conservative middle class, as the White House feared, grew impatient with reform. The administration’s string of brilliant triumphs in civil rights was snapped. Its 1966 Civil Rights Bill, an open-housing proposal, fell victim to a Senate filibuster. Johnson’s leadership of the civil rights movement was a great asset to him in 1964, but it was a political liability by the summer of 1966.

From the start of his presidency, Johnson had recognized that his alliance with the civil rights movement risked substantial Democratic losses in the South. The president’s encouraging visit to Georgia gave him hope that he would be forgiven by white southerners; this was the very purpose of his appeal to conscience. But the elections of November 1966 confirmed the South was not in a forgiving mood. Three segregationist Democrats—Lester Maddox in Georgia, James Johnson in Arkansas, and George P. Mahoney in Maryland—won their party’s gubernatorial nomination. In Alabama, voters ratified a caretaker administration for Lurleen Wallace, since her husband, George, was not permitted to succeed himself. George Wallace, dubbed the “prime minister” of Alabama, had by 1966 emerged as a serious threat to consummate the North-South split in the Democratic party, either by entering the 1968 presidential primaries or running as a third-party candidate. The gubernatorial race in California, where former movie star Ronald Reagan handily defeated the Democratic incumbent Edmund G. Brown, revealed that conservative insurgency was not limited to southern Democrats.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

The prospect of losing the White House in 1968 made certain members of the administration nervous, if not completely repentant, about Johnson having alienated southern Democrats. Yet the fear of “white backlash”—the new phrase for white resentment of black gains through political action—did not shake Johnson’s determination to obtain civil rights progress through legislation and executive action. Johnson had no stomach for a “southern strategy” that retreated from civil rights. The defense of this cause above all was how he intended to make his mark on history, and Johnson’s place in history meant more to him than serving another term as president or the standing of the Democratic Party. Moreover, the civil rights movement had become far too powerful and the issues it raised too riveting for a return to relatively “safe” New Deal issues such as economic security and educational opportunity. Johnson believed that as long as the economy remained strong, the Democrats “could still squeeze through.” “But whatever the consequences,” White House aide Harry McPherson has insisted, LBJ “was determined to make major advances in the area of civil rights.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵

In the wake of the civil rights crisis of 1966, Johnson no longer met with civil rights leaders; nor, however, did he sound a full retreat from civil rights reform. His position on civil disorders is telling. LBJ condemned riots, declaring in a nationwide July 1967 address that “there is no American right to loot stores, or to burn buildings, or to fire rifles from the rooftops. That is a crime—and crime must be dealt with forcefully, and swiftly, and certainly—under law.” At the same time, he insisted, “This is not a time for angry reaction. It is a time for action: starting with legislative action to improve the life in our cities. The strength and promise of the law are the surest remedies for tragedy in the streets.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Johnson responded to the riots by intensifying his efforts to expand civil rights and the War on Poverty programs. The administration continued to push for an open-housing bill, and in the aftermath of King’s assassination, one was passed in 1968. That year, LBJ also submitted and Congress passed the most extensive and most expensive public housing legislation in American history. Finally, Johnson continued to support the White House’s Office of Economic Opportunity, even though its sponsorship of Community Action Programs (CAPs), requiring “the maximum feasible participation of residents of the areas and groups involved,” was reportedly having a disruptive influence in many cities and was the target of bitter complaints from local party leaders.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ LBJ seethed privately about the “revolutionary” activity that some CAPs were fomenting. Nonetheless, he never repudiated them publicly and continued to support federal funds for neighborhood organizations. The War on Poverty’s Community Action Program was the administration’s final, frail hope that it could benefit from the transformative energy of a movement over which it was rapidly losing influence.

Political Failure and “Enlightened” Administration

Against the general norm that presidents are repressive or indifferent in their response to the demands of insurgent groups, Johnson’s uneasy collaboration with the civil rights movement shows how an ambitious president and social activists can form an alliance in the service of enduring reform. Although this fusion of presidential power to a movement for social justice was short-lived, the fragile partnership made possible the most dramatic civil rights legislation since the Reconstruction era. Without the work of King and other civil rights leaders in mobilizing demonstrations that elicited the violent reaction of segregationists and aroused strong sympathy in the country, no civil rights revolution would have been possible. At the same time, without Johnson’s willingness to support, indeed take advantage of, the opportunity that civil rights direct action provided, the landmarks laws of 1964 and 1965 might never have been enacted.

Yet this singularly determined fusion of executive power to a social movement eventually imploded. As early as 1965, it became clear that Johnson’s effort to become a leader of the civil rights movement suffered from his attempt to manage all the other responsibilities that the modern presidency pulls in its train. Johnson’s decision to expand America’s involvement in Vietnam, in particular, stemmed in part from his firm belief that nothing could be accomplished unless certain received commitments were steadfastly affirmed. However, this view unwittingly confirmed the view of civil rights activists that the presidency ultimately could not be trusted to further their cause or to embody their moral vision.

At the end of the day, the Great Society revealed both the untapped potential for cooperation between the modern presidency and social movements and the inherent tensions between “high office” and insurgency that made such collaboration tempestuous. Johnson ultimately failed in his ambition to align himself and the powers of the modern executive with the carriers of a new politics, not only civil rights activists but also consumer and environmental advocates, as well those fighting for women’s rights.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ The tasks of the modern presidency—the domestic and international responsibilities that constrained the “steward of the public welfare”—necessarily limited the extent to which Johnson could become a trusted leader of the social movements that arose during the 1960s. By 1968, Johnson, the self-fashioned agent of a political transformation as fundamental as any in history, had become a hated symbol of the status quo, forced into retirement lest he contribute further to the destruction of the liberal consensus.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

Although Johnson’s presidency profoundly wounded the Democratic Party and the modern executive, the civil rights acts led to the construction of a national administrative apparatus that had an enduring effect on American politics and governance. Whereas the postbellum Republicans denigrated executive administration, the 1964 and 1965 civil rights acts enlisted the president and several executive agencies in an ongoing effort to ban racial discrimination. The civil rights statutes empowered the federal bureaucracy—especially the Department of Justice, the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, and the newly formed EEOC—to assist the courts in creating parallel enforcement mechanisms for civil rights. These proved effective. For example, in four years the Johnson administration accomplished more desegregation in southern schools than the courts had in the previous fourteen.

Indeed, the “civil rights state” that arose from the ashes of the Johnson presidency implemented civil rights reforms in a manner that went well beyond the unfulfilled promises of the Civil War amendments and their explicit design to legislate a colorblind nation.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Attorney General Robert Kennedy expressed a broadly shared national sentiment in 1964 when he said, “I don’t think quotas are a good idea.”Footnote ¹¹¹ Yet as historians like Hugh Davis Graham have chronicled, “new theories of compensatory justice and group rights” given prominent expression in LBJ’s Howard University Address were deftly advanced by “new social regulators” in the EEOC.Footnote ¹¹² Despite the political undoing of the Great Society by decade’s end, the EEOC staff, aided by supporters in other executive agencies and assisted by the federal courts, were able to expand the EEOC’s power far beyond the original constraints of Title VII of the act. The text of Title VII explicitly sought to limit findings of discrimination by requiring evidence of intent. EEOC staffers argued that racial disparities in the composition of a labor force were ample proof of discrimination, whether intended or not. Seizing authority on its own accord, the EEOC collected data from tens of thousands of employers in order to analyze entire industries. Only a couple of years after Johnson left office, the federal courts deferred to EEOC guidelines, tossing aside Title VII’s original dictates in favor of an “effects based definition of discrimination” that went beyond the goal of equal treatment to that of equal results.Footnote ¹¹³ A “quiet revolution” had occurred in national administration, one that dismantled the compromise that Dirksen and moderate Republicans extracted in 1964.

Still, this “quiet revolution” tended to isolate civil rights activists. LBJ paid dearly for the alienation of the social movements from the White House; just as surely, the civil rights movement and the other social protest movements it inspired paid a price for their rejection of presidential leadership. The 1960s unleashed new forces and new expectations that could not be quelled by the election of Richard Nixon. Indeed, it was the 1970s rather than the 1960s when affirmative action and many other civil rights measures became a real presence in American society. And yet, even as they continued to look to the national government to solve the problems thrown up by an industrial—and postindustrial—order, the public-interest groups that emerged during the 1970s, which evolved from the social movements of the 1960s, distrusted presidential leadership and bureaucratic agencies, and sought to protect social policy from unfriendly executive administration.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Teaching Americans both to expect more from the government and to trust it less, the Great Society was the fulcrum on which the decline of liberalism and the rise of conservatism tilted.