Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction

by Allen C. Guelzo

  The second blow came in U.S. v. Cruikshank in 1875. A disputed election in Colfax, Louisiana, led to the deaths of more than 100 black people and the indictment of 98 white people on federal charges of violating the rights of black citizens. Only nine of the arrested whites were actually brought to trial, and three, including William Cruikshank, were convicted. But on appeal, the Supreme Court declared that the federal government had no jurisdiction over state voting practices, except when the states were acting as states. Violations by individuals were matters beyond the reach of the Constitution. “The Constitution of the United States has not conferred the right of suffrage upon any one, and … the United States have no voters of their own creation in the States.”93

  In an effort to circumvent Slaughterhouse Cases and Cruikshank, Congress passed the last of the great Reconstruction legislation in the form of the Civil Rights Act of 1875. The bill, enacted in homage to the recently deceased Charles Sumner, mandated that “all persons within the jurisdiction of the United States shall be entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of the accommodations, advantages, facilities, and privileges of inns, public conveyances on land or water, theaters, and other places of public amusement,” regardless of “race and color,” and gave jurisdiction over the bill to “the district and circuit courts of the United States,” rather than the states.94

  But the bill survived as a federal statute only until 1883, when the Supreme Court overturned it in the Civil Rights Cases. The federal courts had thus slowly removed the federal protections that Reconstruction had placed around black civil rights at every level. “We have been, as a class, grievously wounded, wounded in the house of our friends,” declared the aging Frederick Douglass. “I look upon it as one more shocking development of that moral weakness in high places which has attended the conflict between the spirit of liberty and the spirit of slavery from the beginning. The whole essence of the thing is a studied purpose to degrade and stamp out the liberties of a race. It is the old spirit of slavery, and nothing else.”95

  As the determination of federal authority weakened, the failure of the Reconstruction governments to put a solid economic footing under black civil rights slowly allowed the free-spending Republican administrations of the old South to sink into political quicksand. Without land, the freedmen were forced into sharecropping arrangements on white-owned land that bound them into new webs of dependency on white landowners. As white economic leverage over the freedpeople increased, their willingness to politically challenge Southern whites shrank. As it was, in none of the Reconstructed states did African Americans ever have control of the Reconstruction government, and only in South Carolina, Mississippi, and Louisiana did blacks ever gain a majority of the registered voters. Now even those majorities began to falter, and African Americans soon learned that there were few whites eager to shore those majorities up. Southern Unionist scalawags had entered into the Reconstruction alliance with misgiving, and over time the enemies of Reconstruction were able to play on the residual loyalty of poor whites to a whites-only democracy at least enough to paralyze Southern white support for black civil rights.

  The Northern carpetbaggers were longer in their support of Southern blacks, but the Panic of 1873, with its catastrophic fall in world agricultural prices, ruined the economic base of the carpetbaggers and forced many of them to sell out. The Northerners who worked for the Freedmen’s Bureau began leaving the South after 1869, when Congress unwisely closed down the bureau, and in 1876 the federal troops who had been stationed in the South to stiffen the resolve of the Reconstruction governments were gradually cut back by a cost-conscious Congress to only 3,000 (out of a total army enlistment of 17,000).96

  Southern whites did not wait for the Reconstruction governments to stagger to their end unaided. It would be interesting to speculate what might have happened if Andrew Johnson had obeyed his original impulse in the spring of 1865 to hang a dozen, or even more, of the Confederate leaders, since a punitive action on that scale would have decapitated the potential leadership of any future Southern resistance. Instead, Johnson issued more than 13,000 pardons to former Confederate officers and officials, and as the political resolve of President Grant and the Congress evaporated, many of the former Confederate leaders stepped forward to reassert their old roles. The veteran survivors of the Confederate armies, without jobs, often without land, and frequently without direction, found it all too easy to fall in behind them.97

  What resulted was little better than a low-level resumption of hostilities, only this time in the form of terrorism against blacks and their white Republican allies. Quasi-guerilla movements such as the Knights of the White Camellia, the White League, and the Ku Klux Klan became, in effect, the armed struggle of the old Southern white leadership and the Southern Democrats to restore whites-only rule in the South. In a few cases, such as that of Arkansas Unionist governor Powell Clayton, the Reconstruction governments successfully struck back at the Klan’s use of assassination, intimidation, and fraud. More often, it was easier to inundate Washington with demands for federal military protection—demands that, under the Grant administration, were treated with mounting annoyance as tokens that the Reconstruction governments were failures, and that it might be better to let political matters in the South take their course with a minimum of federal intervention.98

  Playing to that concern, other Southern Democrats portrayed themselves as “Redeemers,” struggling to free themselves not from blacks but from corrupt and bribe-ridden regimes. To sweeten their image, many of the Redeemers promoted the image of a “New Departure” in which the interests of both blacks and whites for better government would converge in the election of virtuous Southern Democrats who, in public at least, had made their peace with Reconstruction. Once installed, however, “Redeemer” governments turned their attention first to disenfranchising African Americans through literacy tests and poll taxes, fastening the bondage of sharecropping and indebtedness on black farmers, and eventually, between 1890 and 1908, creating elaborate codes of “Jim Crow” laws that rigorously segregated African Americans into the poorest housing, the worst educational opportunities, and political oblivion. As the once formidable Republican voter base paled and faded, the road to white Democratic Redemption lay fearfully open.99

  The presidential election of 1876, which pitted Republican Rutherford B. Hayes against New York Democrat Samuel J. Tilden, has generally been singled out as the end of Reconstruction. Actually, Southern Redeemers had been picking off isolated Reconstruction governments all through the 1870s, until by 1876, only South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana were still under some form of Republican rule. In the fall of 1876, the Republican lock on the White House was closely challenged by Tilden and the promise of the Democrats to sweep away the corruptions of the Grant administration. Tilden might have won the election—in fact, should have won it, since he topped Hayes by a quarter of a million popular votes, and ought to have been awarded the 185 electoral votes needed to win the Electoral College—but the Southern and Northern wings of the Democratic Party had fractured over the disposition of lucrative new harbor-clearing projects and a new transcontinental rail line that Southern Democrats wanted built from Memphis and New Orleans westward through Texas. In the five politically volatile months between the election and inauguration day, Hayes and the Southern Democrats patched together an electoral deal that permitted the Republicans to claim favorable recounts in Louisiana, Florida, and South Carolina, in exchange for the proposed “internal improvements” and a promise of non-interference by federal troops in future Southern elections. On March 1, 1877, Hayes was declared president-elect by a margin of exactly one electoral vote. The next day, President Grant informed the Reconstruction governments that he could no longer respond to their requests for federal troops in protecting black voters.100

  Hayes was inaugurated three days later, and he immediately appointed an ex-Confederate as his postmaster general, one of the most influential patronage-dispensing posts in the fede
ral government. He warned a delegation of South Carolina blacks on March 10 that “the use of the military force in civil affairs was repugnant to the genius of American institutions, and should be dispensed with if possible.” (Despite this “repugnance,” Hayes had no hesitation four months later in using federal troops to suppress a great national railway strike). So there was no surprise when, on April 10, Hayes refused to intervene in the disputed South Carolina governor’s election, and withdrew the federal troops that had been protecting governor Daniel H. Chamberlain in the statehouse in Columbia. Chamberlain, seeing the handwriting on the wall, conceded the election to one of Robert E. Lee’s former cavalry chiefs, Wade Hampton. “Today,” Chamberlain bitterly informed his disheartened black supporters, “by order of the President whom your votes alone rescued from overwhelming defeat, the Government of the United States abandons you, deliberately withdraws from you its support, with the full knowledge that the lawful government of the State will be speedily overthrown.”101 In Mississippi, Republican ex-governor Adelbert Ames wrote out what may serve as the epitaph of Reconstruction:

  Yes, a revolution has taken place—by force of arms—and a race are disenfranchised—they are to be returned to a condition of serfdom—an era of second slavery. Now it is too late. The nation should have acted but it was “tired of the annual autumnal outbreaks in the South.” … The political death of the Negro will forever release the nation from the weariness from such “political outbreaks.”102

  Well, not forever. But for then, the Civil War and its era were finally over.

  EPILOGUE

  It was not until August 20, 1866, that President Andrew Johnson officially declared that the Civil War was “at an end and that peace, order, tranquility, and civil authority now exist in and throughout the whole of the United States of America.” Peace enough certainly existed, at least in the sense that the organized shooting was by then long over, but tranquility was quite another matter. Overall, approximately one out of every ten white males of military age in 1860 was dead by 1865 from some war-related cause. Between 1866 and 1885 the Federal War Department issued three successive enumerations of Union army wartime deaths, finally arriving at a figure of 360,222. Precise as this sounds, it was in fact an approximation; and indeed, based on census reconstructions, the numbers of deaths may have been under-reported, on both sides, by as much as 20 percent. There were no death or grave registration units in the Civil War armies; after-action reports contained reckonings of the number killed in action, but those reports relied on the record keeping of sergeants and adjutants who might have limited time and limited information for their accounts. In battles where key officers were killed, tallies and reports were often never made; in some instances, officers were encouraged to undercount their casualties in order to soften the blow to civilian morale back home. At the Wilderness in 1864, Gouverneur K. Warren, commanding the 5th Corps of the Army of the Potomac, was overheard telling a staffer not to report “data which he had gathered at the hospitals. ‘It will never do, Locke, to make a showing of such heavy losses,’ quickly observed Warren.” After that, wrote Morris Schaff, the officer who overheard Warren, I “I always doubted reports of casualties until officially certified.” (Robert E. Lee also appears to have pressured officers to revise their casualty reports downward).1

  Even with this caveat in mind, it seems safe to say that something like 110,000 Northern men were killed outright in battle, with another 250,000 dying of disease, accidents, and even sunstroke; the number of wounded, which could mean anything from minor punctures to double amputation and blindness, was pegged at another 275,000. Added to the 7,000 or so navy dead and wounded, and the butcher’s bill for the preservation of the Union amounted to at least 640,000 dead and wounded. In practical terms, six out of every hundred men of military age in the North died during the war, and one out of every six who actually served perished. Of the soldiers who served, one out of every sixty-five was killed, one out of every fifty-six died of his wounds, one of every thirteen or fourteen died of disease, and one out of every ten was wounded. Every one of these statistics, in turn, generated ripples throughout American society for decades thereafter. As many as 200,000 more Northern soldiers may have died as a result of wounds, disease, and other causes in the single decade after the war. Attached to each of these figures were widening networks of parents or dependent families that saw their breadwinners and children lost or horribly mutilated emotionally and physically by the war. By 1900, the federal government would be paying pensions to nearly a million Union veterans or their dependents, in what amounted to the nation’s first Social Security system. By 1879, pension pay-outs amounted to 11.25 percent of the entire federal budget (at a time when the pension costs for the entire British empire stood at less than 3.5 percent). By 1903, there were 970,322 Civil War pensioners (both veterans and widows of veterans) at a total cost of almost $139 million, which had now become 22.5 percent of all federal expenditures.2

  But these costs paled beside the toll that the war exacted from the Confederacy. Confederate war deaths were, in terms of overall numbers, fewer than the Union’s, although the quality of Confederate record keeping (not unaffected by the amount of Confederate destruction in the last year of the war) is even less reliable than its Union counterpart. Estimates of Confederate battle-related deaths range from 74,500 to 94,000, while between 110,000 to 160,000 Confederate soldiers died of various diseases. But the Confederacy had a far smaller pool of military manpower to draw upon: not only was the military-age population of the South smaller, but it was restricted until the very end of the war to whites, so the war cut a far wider swath through the racial power structure of the South than the numbers may at first suggest. All told, this means that eighteen out of every one hundred Confederate soldiers never came back, three times the death-rate of the Union army. It is almost impossible to estimate how many Southern civilians may have died war-related deaths, due to the disruption of the war and dangers of being a refugee.3

  Along with these lives, a large portion of the prewar Southern economy vanished into the smoke that hung over the devastated Confederacy. Although embittered Southerners were wont to blame most of their losses on Yankee pyromaniacs, the single biggest item in the bill was caused simply by emancipation. Of the $7.2 billion worth of Southern property listed in the 1860 census, $2.4 billion existed in the form of slaves, as the chief capital investment of cotton agriculture. The Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment simply erased the slave assets of the South. A second blow was fiscal in nature, as the money that Southerners had converted into Confederate bonds and notes disappeared the moment it became clear that the United States government had no intention of assuming any part of the Confederate government’s debt obligations. Only after these losses came the destruction of physical capital: as much as 43 percent of the South’s non-slave agricultural assets were destroyed by the war. By 1865, a third of the cattle, horses, and mules of the South were gone, and in the absence of slave labor to till the soil, Southern farm values fell by half. In Alabama, per capita wealth among white farmers fell to one-sixth of what it had been in 1860. In Georgia, one-quarter of the state’s rail lines were piles of useless, twisted iron, and the state controller general helplessly estimated that “almost four-fifths of the entire wealth of Georgia had been destroyed or rendered unproductive.” Even here, though, the plundering of agricultural property included that done by Confederate impressment officers as well as by Yankee foragers.4

  By 1870, the accumulated value of all Southern property stood at only $2.05 billion, which means (after wartime inflation is factored in) that the war cost the South between $5 billion and $8 billion. The irony in these figures is that if Southerners in 1861 had accepted the kind of slave buyout plan Lincoln devised for Delaware that November, then, for the $6.6 billion the Civil War cost the entire nation, every slave could have been freed at market value, with enough to fund the purchase of forty acres and a mule for every slave family, and
still have had $3.5 billion in hand as a fund for promoting black economic entrance into a market economy.5

  It has long been a truism that the Civil War ruined the South but became the maker of the Northern industrial economy; that, in turn, has generated suspicious comment that the war was actually a deliberate mechanism of Yankee capitalists and industrialists to seize control of the republic from its agrarian patriarchs. But the wastage of the Southern economy in the postwar years was not entirely a product of the war, nor was the explosion of Northern industry. Southerners had pegged their prewar economic success to cotton, and believed devoutly that King Cotton would force the European nations to intervene on their behalf. Too many of them had spent too much time in an environment in which the laws of demand—whether of slaves or commodities—allowed them to ignore the complementary laws of supply. And sure enough, even before the War had come to its first major battle, cotton consumers in Europe were busy shifting to other sources of supply. The viceroy of Egypt “with a laugh” assured the Confederate propagandist Edwin De Leon, “If your people stop the cotton supply for Europe, my people will have to grow more and furnish them.” And so they did. India doubled its exports of cotton to Britain; Brazil quadrupled its cotton exports; Egypt was shipping more than half a million bales to British cotton mills by 1865. Cotton remained king; it simply transferred its throne.6