After Lincoln

by A. J. Langguth

  Southerners watched the many military men from Howard’s staff moving into state jobs as civilians and considered them tarred by their association with Northern carpetbaggers. The bureau’s critics also claimed—with some justification—that a bureau agent was more likely to be reprimanded for trying to influence Negroes to vote for the Democrats than to vote for the Republicans.

  Howard’s recent policies were dismaying the bureau’s clients, as well. After trying to give former slaves their forty acres, Howard had been stymied by Andrew Johnson’s rapid restoration of their property to white Southern landowners.

  With the president demanding that he conform to Washington’s approach, Howard fell back on allocating only abandoned land, but he understood that any more ambitious program of compensation was doomed.

  Nor was homesteading a realistic possibility since Southern and Western legislators were conniving to keep black families out of their territories. Of the 67,609 homestead applications filed throughout the South, only four thousand came from former slaves.

  Caught between the president and his own black constituency, Howard recommended that the freedmen accept cash payment for their labor. But when they returned to their former plantations as sharecroppers, the terms of their agreement tethered them to a white man’s plantation as securely as slavery had done.

  • • •

  Before the presidential election of 1868, Congress had already scaled back the bureau’s activities to education and to paying Negro soldiers who had never collected their enlistment bonuses. Then Congress cut $100,000 from Howard’s $187,500 budget for the fiscal year ending in June 1871, and he accepted that the end had come to his efforts.

  Since his agents would now report directly to the army’s district commanders under the Military Reconstruction Act, Howard recommended that the War Department assume his bureau’s final duties after it officially went out of existence in June 1872.

  By now, Howard regretted his earlier optimism about racial healing in the South. Privately, he had come to endorse—with charitable regret—the attempt to remove Andrew Johnson from the White House. “I do not wish him ill,” Howard said, “but I do wish my country well.”

  Throughout his failure to distribute land, Howard had never lost faith in education as the best tool for guaranteeing former slaves their place in the postwar South.

  Despite the continual shortage of money, Howard had presided over nearly three thousand schools serving 150,000 pupils. Most of them had been funded by missionary societies and local black communities.

  Teachers were often Northern white women who had graduated from normal schools. Life for those volunteers meant giving up familiar comforts and either living alone or boarding with a black family. These white women were passed over for jobs as principals or superintendents in favor of their male colleagues, and they stayed in Southern schools for an average of two years.

  Meantime, the Freedmen’s Bureau was also recruiting black teachers as it moved to fulfill Howard’s vision—first, the spread of elementary and trade schools and then the South’s first black colleges: Atlanta, Fisk, and Tugaloo.

  As the capstone, Howard saw a university that would offer degrees in law, medicine, and theology, with enrollment not limited to black students.

  Such a university was approved by Washington’s First Congregational Church and opened in 1867 as a theological seminary in the District of Columbia. With the range of courses expanding, the institution was named, over his protest, for the man who had inspired it.

  When General Howard resigned officially from the Freedmen’s Bureau, he accepted the presidency of Howard University.

  Once in the job, Howard described his new position to John Forney, the former Senate secretary, who himself had taken up new duties: After backing Grant for the presidency, Forney had been appointed collector at the port of Philadelphia.

  With evident satisfaction, Howard wrote that his institution was proving daily “that the dark color of the skin does not of itself unfavorably affect the intellect.”

  • • •

  At the time when Howard was recoiling from an increase in violence against Southern blacks, members of Congress were also being forced to pay attention. Benjamin Butler got an anonymous warning as early as the spring of 1868:

  “Butler, prepare to meet your God! The avenger is upon your track! Hell is your portion! KKK.”

  Ben Wade and other Republican leaders had received similar threats as the Freedmen’s Bureau support for public schools was setting off increasingly bloody retaliation. Schools and black churches were being destroyed, white teachers whipped and sometimes killed.

  It was a town in South Carolina that provoked a showdown between the Klan and Washington, D.C. Residents of Yorkville were informed by Klan members that a group of former slaves was threatening to burn down the town. The Klan posted notices that if any fires were set, Klansmen would kill ten local black men as revenge, along with two white carpetbaggers.

  They underscored the threat by shooting a Negro named Tim Black from nearby Rock Hill eighteen times before they cut his throat.

  More violence flared throughout the state. A black county commissioner was murdered, a house filled with former slaves attacked, two black men lynched—all Republicans.

  Compelled finally to act, Congress launched a bruising debate and, over the objection of Democrats, passed the first of three measures on May 31, 1870, to stem the racial crimes throughout the South. Called the Enforcement Acts, they made any attempt to deprive a citizen of his civil or political rights a federal crime.

  To empower the legislation, Congress added a Department of Justice to the president’s cabinet. As his new attorney general, Grant reached deep into Georgia for an obscure and unlikely champion of Negro rights named Amos T. Akerman.

  A former Confederate army officer, Akerman had come to Grant’s attention by campaigning for him in 1868 and had been repaid with an appointment as his state’s U.S. attorney.

  That honor alone would have gratified a modest small-town lawyer, but when Grant resolved to remove Ebenezer Hoar, another of Charles Sumner’s cronies, from his cabinet, he settled on Akerman as Hoar’s replacement.

  Because Akerman lived thirty miles from the nearest telegraph office, he had not yet learned of his appointment when senators were already wondering just who he might be.

  • • •

  On arriving in Washington, Akerman soon demonstrated unique qualifications for his assignment. Born in New Hampshire and graduating from Philips Exeter Academy and Dartmouth College, he had moved south to practice law in a town northeast of Atlanta. For the next twenty years, he deplored the drumbeat leading to war, but when war came, Akerman, at age forty, signed on with the Georgia home guard.

  After Lee’s surrender, Akerman had accepted the peace terms, spoken freely on behalf of the rights of former slaves, and joined the 1868 campaign that restored Georgia’s delegates to Congress.

  To assist Akerman in his crusade, Grant created the new position of solicitor general and appointed another Southerner, Benjamin Bristow, who had proved himself as U.S. attorney in Kentucky.

  Neither man underestimated the growing strength of their adversary. Akerman announced that to crush the Klan would “amount to war,” and he and Bristow authorized federal troops throughout the South to make massive arrests.

  The Carolinas were an early target. An estimated forty thousand Klan members in North Carolina had contributed to the terror that elected five Democrats of the state’s seven congressmen. The state legislature was equally out of balance, with thirty-six conservative senators and only three Negroes and two Northerners. In the lower house, seventy-five conservatives outnumbered the nineteen Negroes and two carpetbaggers.

  Akerman found conditions in South Carolina even worse. He announced that “from the beginning of the world until now” no community “nominally civilized has been so fully under the domination of systematic and organized depravity.”

  Gran
t agreed that the Klan had become an invisible empire throughout the South and appealed to the Forty-second Congress for even broader powers to combat it.

  Butler of Massachusetts and Representative Samuel Shellabarger of Ohio were quick to respond with legislation that would make a federal crime of conspiring “to overthrow or destroy by force the government of the United States.”

  Butler had lost his prosecution of Andrew Johnson, but he intended to prevail now. He read aloud to his colleagues a hasty note sent to the wife of a missionary just before the Alabama Klan lynched him. “Let each member of the House read the letter,” he said when he had finished. “Then let them vote against a bill to repress such outrages, if he dare, and then reckon with the people of his country and afterward with his God.”

  • • •

  Grant was seeking the kind of emergency powers that Lincoln had assumed with the outbreak of war, including new authority to suspend habeas corpus wherever the president declared a state of insurrection.

  That venerable writ required that suspects not be held in secret but be brought before a judge to determine whether they had been legally detained.

  To enforce the new legislation—called the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 or simply the Force Bill—the president could call out the army, and the scope of the measure united conservative Republicans like Lyman Trumbull of Illinois with Democrats who saw the bill as an intolerable intrusion on states’ rights. Trumbull, never comfortable with the Radicals in his party, had sided with them only after Andrew Johnson made compromise impossible.

  In recent months, Trumbull had bridled at Grant’s role in deposing Charles Sumner from his chairmanship. He wanted justice for Sumner, Trumbull said, although “I am not a special friend of the Senator from Massachusetts” and often had differed with him—“I am sorry to say, unpleasantly.”

  Grant had won out then. Confronted now with the Ku Klux Klan legislation, Trumbull was torn. He deplored the beatings and lynchings of Negroes, but he considered the Republican governments throughout the South to be both corrupt and inept. The KKK bill was “a great humbug got up by Butler” and other Radicals to perpetuate the rule “of the carpetbaggers and scalawags in the South.”

  His judiciary committee ignored Trumbull’s objections and passed the bill, but he refused to participate in the ritual of presenting it to the full Senate. During the debate, Trumbull drew a distinction between civil rights and other political rights that were not protected by the U.S. Constitution.

  “Individual rights,” he concluded, “are safest, as a general rule, when left to the protection of the locality.”

  As the debate came to a climax, Trumbull announced that denying the vote to white rebels had been a fatal error because it had transferred power to “corrupt and dishonest persons” who had plundered their state governments. At least, the Confederates “whatever may be said of their guilt as rebels, were neither robbers nor thieves.”

  Trumbull ignored testimony that showed a new crisis throughout the South. Carpetbaggers were sometimes attacked for offering Negro workers higher wages than Southern employers were willing to match. When the cotton yield in Georgia proved to be larger in 1870 than any produced under slavery, it became more difficult to argue that black men and women would not work as hard now that they had their freedom.

  As for corruption, when a railroad owner like Hannibal I. Kimball spread large bribes throughout the legislatures to obtain rights of way and easements, his money was colorblind. Most of it ended up with the local white officials who still controlled their governments.

  Rebuttal to Trumbull from his own party came swift and angry. Oliver Morton of Indiana countered the charge of corruption in Southern Republican governments by pointing to Trumbull’s own embrace of the spoils system: He had extorted from the Grant administration 103 jobs for his friends.

  When objections from the Democrats and men like Trumbull seemed about to sink the bill, Grant responded with a personal appeal. Taking his cabinet officers along, he went to the Capitol on March 23, 1871, to rally the Republican legislators.

  They explained to the president that their Northern constituents were losing interest in further punitive measures. Unless he was willing to lead the crusade and risk his popularity, the legislation would fail.

  Grant cut off the discussion and began to write out a statement:

  “A condition of affairs now exists in some of the States of the Union rendering life and property insecure, and the carrying of the mails and the collection of the revenues dangerous.”

  Grant was giving congressmen an excuse for federal intervention. He concluded with a pledge that underscored the urgency he felt: He would not recommend legislation on any other subject during the current congressional session.

  The bill passed one month later.

  • • •

  Congress then appointed a joint committee of seven senators and nine representatives to investigate what its members called the “Ku Klux conspiracy,” and during the congressional recess its members traveled south to hear testimony.

  They intended to verify the widespread rumors of murder and cruelty with eyewitness accounts. Besides South Carolina, the committee would also hear evidence from as many as a hundred witnesses each in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, and North Carolina.

  South Carolina’s governor was appealing to Grant for emergency aid since his limited force could not stand up to the Klan and its sympathizers. In Unionville, forty Klan members had stormed a jail where two dozen black militia were being held in connection with the murder of a Confederate veteran. The Klan seized five prisoners from their cells and shot them.

  When the sheriff tried to protect the remaining Negroes, hundreds of armed white men cordoned off the town and brought the sheriff’s wife to the jail with a gun to her head. Yielding, he gave up ten more blacks to the mob for execution.

  • • •

  General William Sherman had already responded to the savagery in South Carolina by sending the Seventh U.S. Cavalry in March 1871 to restore order, transferring a thousand soldiers from the Western plains, where they had been contending against the Cheyenne, Comanche, and other tribes as the nation pushed westward.

  Six months later, Attorney General Akerman went personally to Yorkville, South Carolina, to sift through the evidence being collected. His arrival spurred the federal marshal to join with Sherman’s troops and begin to make arrests.

  Grant agreed to suspend the writ of habeas corpus in the most virulent South Carolina counties. That crackdown led to a flight of Klan leaders from the state, with James W. Avery, a planter and owner of a large general store, among those who vanished.

  Since 1868, Major Avery had headed the local Klan, whose members were devoted to political intimidation and had little interest in petty crime. Avery had tried to curtail the abuses that would lead to federal intervention, but his rank and file proved impossible to control.

  Elias Hill, a black Baptist minister with legs misshapen from childhood, had opened a local school for Negro children. One midnight, six shrouded Klansmen burst in on him, carried him out of his house, denounced him as an agitator, and whipped and beat him.

  When he recovered, Hill concluded that he could never again live peaceably in the white South. Organizing a group of 136 Negroes at the end of 1871, he sailed for the black settlement in Liberia. Writing home from the capital at Monrovia, Hill reported that his companions had been received warmly and promised good land for their fresh start.

  To protect those blacks who chose to remain in Yorkville, Akerman sent four hundred soldiers throughout the area to round up those Klansmen who had not disappeared with Major Avery. Hoping for milder punishment, many Klansmen were confessing their membership, and their numbers became too great for the jail cells. They were allowed to remain free on their personal parole until their cases could be heard.

  By the beginning of 1882, 195 persons in York County had been imprisoned; another hundred had fled the county. At lea
st five hundred more surrendered and were deported or released.

  Those locked up in the three-story county jail received daily visitors bringing food and flowers. A reporter for the New York Tribune detected no shame among townsfolk over the Klan’s behavior. They were outraged instead by Grant’s suspension of habeas corpus.

  The Democrats accused the government of inhuman treatment, but the prisoners themselves did not make that charge. In fact, a town’s more prosperous citizens welcomed the disbanding of a Klan that had turned thuggish and lawless.

  • • •

  Moving through Alabama, the congressional panel heard from men like Augustus Blair of Huntsville, Alabama, an elderly former slave. During the war, he had been a trusted guardian of white children, but in the new South, Blair had seen his grown son dragged from their house and kicked to death for an offense never explained.

  When Blair went into town to file a complaint against the Klan members he recognized, white officials warned him to go back to his farm. He did as he was told and found that while he had been away, his thirty hogs, milk cow, and four bales of hay had been stolen.

  At another hearing, this one in Atlanta, Maria Carter, a twenty-eight-year-old former slave, testified about the night the Klan came hunting for her next-door neighbor, John Walthall.

  At the sight of the masked intruders, Walthall’s wife started to scream. Mrs. Carter said, “I heard some of them say, ‘God damn her, shoot her.’ ”

  Maria Carter cowered in her bed with her newborn infant and listened as Walthall was forced to wrap his arms around his wife so they could be whipped together.

  When three of the men came back to her cabin and caught Mrs. Carter’s husband and her elderly uncle returning home, they beat them bloody in front of her. One man in “a sort of gown” put his gun to her face, but another of them said, “Don’t you shoot her.”