There was a counter-convention at Pittsburg; there were "soldiers' and sailors' conventions" on both sides. From the Cabinet three members, Speed, Denison and Harlan, resigned because their convictions were with Congress; but Stanton remained as Secretary of War, though he was now a bitter opponent of the President,--a safeguard over the army, as the radical leaders considered him, and by his attitude and natural temper a constant exasperation to his nominal chief. A fierce and bloody riot in New Orleans, of which the precise causes were obscure, but in which the negroes were the sufferers, heightened the Northern anxiety as to the general situation.
The popular tide evidently ran with Congress, yet Johnson had the promise of very respectable support until he threw it away. His extempore expressions suggested an overweening view of his own position. To the committee reporting to him the Philadelphia convention, he said, "We have seen hanging upon the verge of the government, as it were, a body called, or which assumes to be, the Congress of the United States--but in fact a Congress of only a part of the States." In September he made a tour of the Northern States, taking in his train Secretaries Seward and Welles, with Grant and Farragut;--"swinging round the circle," he called his trip. He made addresses in the principal cities, in which he denounced his opponents, sometimes with vulgar abuse, bragged of his own rise from tailor to President, and bandied words with the mob. He shamed many of the men of character--Beecher among them--who had viewed him with favor. The tide turned overwhelmingly against him. The November election returned a Congress consisting in the House of 143 Republicans to 49 Democrats, with a Senate of 42 Republicans to 11 Democrats.
It was like the hand of Nemesis that the South, led to crushing defeat by its slave-holding aristocracy, should now have its interests sacrificed through the characteristic faults of one of its poor whites,--his virtues overborne by his narrow judgment, uncontrolled temper and coarse speech.
Warned by the election, the South might well have accepted the Fourteenth Amendment as the price of its restoration. But it failed to read the handwriting on the wall. It could not yet brook acquiescence in the exclusion of its old leaders, and the alternative of negro suffrage or reduced power in Congress. The pride of race, the unquenched spirit of the "lost cause," prompted it to stand out for better terms. During the autumn and winter of 1866-7 the lately seceded States, except Tennessee, rejected the amendment. So failed the first congressional plan of reconstruction, as the President's earlier plan had failed. And now there was small hesitation or delay in framing and enforcing the final plan.