Johnson’s plan restored most of the prewar southern leadership to positions of power and effectively removed the federal government from any role in the South. The occupying soldiers in the rapidly diminishing armed forces and the Freedmen’s Bureau would withdraw once the seceding states met the relatively simple requirements for readmission. Redemption had come sooner than expected, and southern whites who had ridiculed Johnson as “the drunken tailor from the mountains,” or “the po’ white demagogue,” now called him a statesman.9
Even these mild terms rankled some white southerners. Mississippi refused to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery, yet Johnson accepted the state’s new government anyway. South Carolina repealed rather than nullified its ordinance of secession, implying that the ordinance was legal. Many southern whites refused to believe that anything should change as a result of the war. Whitelaw Reid spent a convivial evening with David Levy Yulee, the former U.S. senator from Florida, and reported, “It was amusing to see how ignorant he was that during the last four years anything had happened!… That there was any modification of the old order of things … had never occurred to him.”10
Johnson dispatched Carl Schurz on a fact-finding mission to the South to determine the impact of his policies. Schurz, a leading Republican politician, a Civil War general, and a former abolitionist, had the credentials to offer the president an honest appraisal of conditions in the South. Johnson either vastly overestimated southern white contrition or underestimated Schurz’s independence, because the report he received concluded that a counterrevolution had occurred in the South. It was as if the Confederate state governments had taken a brief recess and returned to business as usual. Alexander Stephens took up his old seat in Congress. Also elected to Congress in the fall 1865 special elections were numerous Confederate generals, six cabinet members, and fifty-eight men who had served in the Confederate Congress. It seemed only natural, an Alabamian confided to Whitelaw Reid: “We tried to leave the Union. You have defeated us in our effort. What can there be, then, for us to do but to return our Senators and Representatives to the Congress?” More ominously, the state governments armed and reactivated their militias, ostensibly to keep the peace in a still-lawless region. What peacekeeping they would do soon became clear. A Mississippi militiaman predicted, “Our negroes have … a tall fall ahead of them. They will learn that freedom and independence are different things.”11
The restored southern state legislatures enacted Black Codes among their first orders of business. The statutes severely restricted black mobility and imposed heavy fines and prison sentences for relatively minor infractions. Some of the “crimes” included using “insulting” gestures or language and preaching the Gospel without a license. Those blacks who “misspent what they earn” also ran afoul of the law. The laws replaced slavery as the institutional control for black labor. The South Carolina code, for example, prohibited a freedman from entering any employment other than agricultural labor or domestic service unless he obtained a special license from a judge to certify his “skill and fitness” and “good moral character.” Freedmen’s Bureau officials generally stood back. They lived among southern whites, and the hostility to their presence was great enough without unpopular interventions. The federal officials also believed, along with their southern neighbors, that without some compulsion, the former slave would not work and therefore would retard southern economic recovery.12
Schurz’s report chronicled southern whites’ virulent refusal to allow the freedmen to exercise their rights as citizens. He appended a long list of incidents where whites had murdered, whipped, or persecuted blacks for no apparent crime other than asserting their freedom. Schurz highlighted the fundamental difference between Johnson’s view of reconstruction and that of most Republicans. “It is not only the political machinery of the States and their constitutional relations to the general government, but the whole organism of southern society that must be reconstructed, or rather constructed anew, so as to bring it into harmony with the rest of American society.” He asserted that there was “among the southern people an utter absence of national feeling.” As to why, he had no doubt that “the southern people cherished, cultivated, idolized their peculiar interests and institutions in preference to those which they had in common with the rest of the American people.” At the heart of a fair and lasting reconstruction lay the “negro question.” Schurz concluded that the only solution was a continued and strong federal military presence in the South.13
Johnson believed politics motivated Schurz’s findings, but by the late fall of 1865 he needed some affirmation for his policies as public clamor in the North against the southern restoration grew. In November, he sent General Grant to the South. Grant’s report was, literally, a whitewash. While Schurz had traveled all over the South for three months and interviewed a wide range of southerners, Grant undertook a whirlwind tour of one week to the Carolinas and Georgia. He found, accurately, that white southerners wanted “self government, within the Union, as soon as possible.” He praised Freedmen’s Bureau agents who insisted that the freedmen sign work contracts with planters. “In some instances,” Grant wrote, “I am sorry to say, the freedman’s mind does not seem to be disabused of the idea that a freedman has the right to live without care or provision for the future.” His evidence rested on the continued agitation of former slaves for land and their propensity to leave farms to look for work and families in towns and cities. The great objection, in other words, was that blacks were exercising their freedom. If the freedmen, like the Indians, persisted in testing their freedom, they would suffer a similar and inevitable fate, Grant believed. Unless checked, he predicted, these expressions of freedom “will tend to the extermination or great reduction of the colored race.”14
The Johnson restoration plan enabled white southerners to openly express their fealty to the Lost Cause and its heroes. Jefferson Davis, whom many Rebels reviled during the war, became a widely sympathetic figure when the Federals incarcerated him. Generals Joseph E. Johnston and P. G. T. Beauregard received ovations wherever they went in the South. And Robert E. Lee was a living god. Oath taking, a serious business in nineteenth-century America, became a meaningless if distasteful hurdle for those petitioning for their rights. A former Confederate official boasted to Whitelaw Reid, “I’ve taken the oath, and I’m just as big a Rebel now as ever I was.” The hostility took Reid aback, but his companion assured him that it would dissipate if the government did three things: “reestablish slavery; give the old masters in some way power to compel the negroes to work; or colonize them out of the country, and help us to bring in white laborers!” Reid was flabbergasted. “Such waste and destruction all about,” he wrote, “and still these insatiable men … want more conciliation!” White southerners could not consider themselves redeemed unless they could have their way with the freedmen. That was the essence of the independence they sought.15
Northern public opinion objected to the parade of former Confederates returned to power in the South and in the Congress. But how could any other result claim legitimacy? Would governments elected by blacks and a handful of white Unionists receive the respect of the majority any more than the pro-slavery legislature at Lecompton in Kansas a decade earlier represented the will of the people of that territory? Northern Republicans tended to overestimate the number of southern Unionists. Reid’s travels in the South, however, convinced him “there was no such party” as Unionists in the South. Any government that relied on blacks and small numbers of “aggrieved and vindictive whites,” as Reid put it, could only be “held up by aid from without, to sway power … over a people who, but for the bayonet, would submerge them in a week.”16
Here was a major dilemma of reconstructing the Union. The process would need to include former Rebels, and it was doubtful if these men would participate in a system that included the freedmen as partners. Any program that extended even modest protections to black men would lack legitimacy in the eyes of many sout
hern whites, even if the Republicans could attract enough whites to form interracial coalitions that resulted in an electoral majority. It was not a question of majority rule. Many white southerners had little use for the concept; they had destroyed the Union because of their opposition to a legitimate democratic election. In South Carolina, African Americans comprised the majority of the voting population. In several states of the Lower South blacks and a small coterie of sympathetic whites could create winning coalitions. The issue of legitimacy had less to do with numbers than with the fact of black participation.
Some have argued that if the federal government had been firm with the white South at the end of the war and established a reconstruction process that proceeded in stages requiring adherence to certain principles including black suffrage, the outcome would have been different. Southern whites from the outset, however, acknowledged only the failure of their independence movement and the demise of slavery (and those only grudgingly). Even prewar moderates such as Wade Hampton made it clear that they would resist any additional requirements. The depth of white southern animosity was reflected in the flurry of legislation and other strictures against the black population during the remainder of 1865. Even Yankee kindness did not soften white southern hearts, or perhaps southerners interpreted small generosities as weakness or expressions of guilt. In late 1865, a destitute elderly white woman in Richmond received a box of rations from federal troops stationed there. As she made her way home, she faltered under her burden. A Union soldier, seeing her distress, ran up and offered his help. The woman seemed relieved and said, “Young man, you Yankees are not as horrid as I’ve believed. I hope that if there is a cool spot in hell that you will find it.”17
The most vigorous expression of white sentiment came in the form of violence, despite the presence of Union troops. Sometimes the confrontations occurred for political reasons, other times to maintain social traditions, and most commonly to put the freedman in his proper lowly place. As a white Tennessean commented in late 1865, “Nigger life’s cheap now. When a white man feels aggrieved at anything a nigger’s done, he just shoots him and puts an end to it.”18
Thirteen Confederate veterans met in a Pulaski, Tennessee, law office in December 1865 to form the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan was nominally a social club, though its members admitted that intimidating the former slaves and their white allies was their purpose from the outset. By early 1867, the Klan was a full-fledged terrorist organization. Sometimes, their nocturnal visits settled old scores, such as a freedman’s service in the Union army. Rhoda Ann Childs, a black woman in Henry County, Virginia, testified that masked men called for her husband one night.
I said he was not there.… They then seized me and took me some distance from the house, where they bucked me down across a log. Stripped my clothes over my head, one of the men standing astride my neck, and beat me across my posterior. Then I was thrown upon the ground on my back, one of the men stood upon my breast, while two others took hold of my feet and stretched my limbs as far as apart as they could, while the man standing upon my breast applied the strap to my private parts until fatigued into stopping, and I was more dead than alive. They swore they ought to shoot me, as my husband had been in the “god damned Yankee Army.”19
Such individual “lessons” were common throughout the South in the first year after the war. A Freedmen’s Bureau official in Kentucky counted, over the course of several months in his district, “twenty-three cases of severe and inhuman beating and whipping of men; four of beating and shooting; two of robbing and shooting; three of robbing; five men shot and killed; two shot and wounded; four beaten to death; one beaten and roasted; three women assaulted and ravished; four women beaten; [and] two women tied up and whipped until insensible.” It was almost impossible to bring the perpetrators to trial, as whites refused to testify. A bureau official in Georgia claimed, “The American Indian is not more delighted at the writhings and shrieks of his victim at the stake, than many Georgians are at the agonizing cries of the African negro at the whipping post.”20
“Whipping a Negro Girl in North Carolina,” 1867. (General Research Division, the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilder Foundations)
Few venues presented as many challenges to white authority as southern cities. In the spring and summer of 1866, race riots erupted in Memphis and New Orleans. Both episodes involved the assertion by freedmen of their presumed rights. In Memphis, recently discharged black soldiers clashed with white police over the arrest of a black man. The rapid growth of the city’s black population and vigorous enforcement of vagrancy laws heightened tensions between the police and freedmen. Retaliating against the assault on the police, white mobs invaded the black section of Memphis, torching homes, businesses, and churches, and attacking residents. The Union army commander refused to intervene, explaining that “he had a large amount of public property to guard; that a considerable part of the troops he had were not reliable; that they hated Negroes too.” The dead included forty-six blacks (including three women and two children) and two white men. The local newspaper endorsed the outcome: “The late riots in our city have satisfied all of one thing: that the southern men will not be ruled by the negro.… The negroes now know, to their sorrow, that it is best not to arouse the fury of the white man.”21
In New Orleans, the dispute revolved around a constitutional convention and the demands of the city’s black community for a suffrage provision. A white mob confronted a group of black workers who had marched to the convention site, and a melee erupted, resulting in 48 dead (37 of whom were black) and 166 wounded before late-arriving federal troops quelled the disturbance. A New Orleans newspaper had a message for local blacks, similar to the one western journalists transmitted to the Indians: “Every real white man is sick of the negro, and the ‘rights’ of the negro. Teach the negro that if he goes to work, keeps his place, and behaves himself, he will be protected by our white laws; if not, this Southern road will be ‘a hard one to trave,’ [sic] for the whites must and shall rule to the end of time, even if the fate of Ethiopia be annihilation.”22
These episodes, and others, demonstrated that the freedmen would not go submissively into their second-class caste status and that southern whites would retaliate forcibly. What unfolded in the decade after the Civil War was another civil war, this one between black and white southerners. A white North Carolinian remarked, “With reference to emancipation, we are at the beginning of the war.”23
When Congress finally convened on December 4, 1865, having been out of session since March 3, its members were in a fighting mood. Thundered Illinois senator George W. Julian, “Indict, convict and hang Jeff. Davis in the name of God; as for Robert E. Lee, unmolested in Virginia, hang him too. And stop there? Not at all. I would hang liberally while I had my hand in.” Ohio senator Benjamin Wade suggested, “If the negroes by insurrection could contrive to slay one-half of the Southern whites, the remaining half would then hold them in respect and treat them with justice.” As one Republican noted, “The Confederacy, though beaten, refuses to die.”24
Northerners looked for contrition on the part of southerners for what many considered treason. The presence of prominent Confederates in elective office, the defiant attitudes of whites, and the persistent verbal and physical assaults against African Americans rankled most northerners. They wanted to put the war behind them as quickly as possible, but they would not cavalierly dismiss the causes for which so many men died. The war supposedly ended slavery and established the supremacy of the federal government. In December 1865, these outcomes were by no means secure.
Attacking the Black Codes was high on the congressional agenda. Of all the legislation and defiance emanating from the defeated South, these measures highlighted white southerners’ unwillingness to accept the verdict of the war. The Civil Rights Act of 1866 addressed the Codes by creating the category of national citizenship with rights that superseded state laws. The act reinforced the Republicans’ aggressive growth of
the government during the war and shifted power even more toward Washington. President Johnson vetoed the act as a usurpation of state prerogative. Congress mustered a two-thirds majority to override the veto, the first time in American history that Congress passed major legislation over a president’s veto. The vote set the stage for a bitter contest between the president and Congress over reconstruction policy that nearly resulted in Johnson’s impeachment.
To keep freedmen’s rights safe from presidential vetoes, state legislatures, and federal courts, Congress moved to incorporate some of the provisions of the Civil Rights Act into the Constitution. The Fourteenth Amendment, which Congress passed and sent on to the states for ratification in June 1866, guaranteed every citizen equality before the law. The two key sections of the amendment prohibited states from violating the civil rights of their citizens, thus rendering the Black Codes unconstitutional, and gave states the choice of enfranchising blacks or losing representation in Congress. Republicans made ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment a prerequisite for any southern state seeking readmission to the Union.
The amendment failed to give African Americans the vote outright. It reflected a compromise between the minority Radical faction and the more moderate Republicans who believed that states should decide voting rights for their residents. The amendment disappointed advocates of woman suffrage, for the first time including the word “male” in the Constitution to define who could vote. Wendell Phillips, a prominent abolitionist, counseled women, “One question at a time. This hour belongs to the Negro.” Susan B. Anthony, who had campaigned for the abolition of slavery before the war and helped mount a petition drive that collected four hundred thousand signatures for the Thirteenth Amendment, founded the American Equal Rights Association in 1866 to push for woman suffrage at the state level.25
America Aflame Page 59
