Certainly General Saxton was well suited to run the Bureau—except that to some he was a bit too “ultra.” Not so General Howard, a man of narrow though well-meaning views, a penchant for platitudes, and a belated and befuddled conversion to antislavery. Named the head of the Freedmen’s Bureau, he would manage affairs from faraway Washington while Rufus Saxton, who gracefully accepted an appointment as assistant commissioner, would stay in South Carolina. The government thought Howard the better choice. He was not an abolitionist but rather a pious Christian whose conversion experience in 1857 did not preclude him from shouldering a rifle. Familiarly known as “the Christian soldier,” Howard would presumably appeal to civilian philanthropic organizations. He did not drink or swear and, like John Brown and Stonewall Jackson, though of a milder temperament, the devout Howard optimistically believed in the moral righteousness of his cause, which was the restoration of the Union first and emancipation second. Educated at West Point (graduating fourth in the class of 1854) and at Bowdoin College in Maine, he had fought at the First Battle of Bull Run and lost his arm at Fair Oaks. He had seen action at Antietam, Fredericksburg, and Chancellorsville, where his troops were routed by Stonewall Jackson, and at Gettysburg he had faltered so badly that Joe Hooker had said that if Howard hadn’t been “born in petticoats he ought to have been, and ought to wear them.” Regardless, Sherman had selected him to lead the Army of the Tennessee, which, headed by this one-armed Christian soldier, had marched through Georgia and the Carolinas savagely burning what they could not carry.
Though he had fired his Christian gun in a cause that also included emancipation, Howard’s commitment to universal suffrage and equal protection of blacks under the law was lukewarm. Radical Republicans were disappointed. Sure, Howard was “a man of pure purposes, unspoiled integrity, and undoubted singleness of aim,” they said. “But his mind is neither so broad, so penetrating, nor so aspiring as his work demands.” Plus, as his friend General Sherman reminded him, when it came to a freedman, be a realist, not a New Englander; keep your expectations low. And that he seemed to do. He embraced the advice of well-wishers such as the preeminent man of the cloth, Henry Ward Beecher. Urging peace and reconciliation at the Union flag-raising ceremony at Fort Sumter in April 1865, Beecher counseled against “too much Northern management of the Negro.” Beyond a “small start, in tools, seed, etc.,” Beecher cautioned, nothing more should be given the freedman, particularly because the North harbored that frequent, misguided tendency “to dandle the black man, or at least, to recite his suffering.”
No one need have worried. Oliver Otis Howard would not mollycoddle anyone, least of all Rufus Saxton.
THOUGH HORATIO ALGER, JR., would not invent Ragged Dick until 1867, the tale of rags to riches was already a mainstay of American folklore, at least in the North. Southern planters were less enthralled, and Edward Pollard, the fire-eating editor of the Richmond Examiner, cast a very cold eye on the self-made man—or what was known in his circle as a “scrub.” Andy Johnson was a scrub: impeccable clothes couldn’t conceal the gaucheness of that backwoods Tennessee tailor given to malapropisms. Johnson knew what the planters thought of him; in turn, he hated the Southern elite and their condescension. He hated their sense of superiority. He had fought them when they spouted off about secession. A Jacksonian Democrat, he had even joined up with Lincoln and the Republicans to defeat them, to preserve the Union, and, not coincidentally, to advance his career.
It wasn’t long after Johnson took the oath of office, though, that the Republicans realized that the new president wasn’t one of them either. When they requested a special session of Congress to deal with Reconstruction—Congress was not due to convene until the December after Lincoln’s assassination, almost seven months away—Johnson rebuffed them, and he took Reconstruction into his own hands. His plan for Reconstruction was a restoration—a restoration of the Union exactly as it was, just without slavery. He wouldn’t hear of rights of the freedmen and women. For Johnson made no secret of his racism. While seeming to conciliate the Republicans and to praise black troops, he was also heard to have said, “This is a country for white men and, by G-d, as long as I am president it shall be a government for white men.”
In May 1865 Johnson proclaimed a general and generous amnesty to Southerners willing to take the oath of allegiance; he excluded Confederate government and military leaders and those rich rebels whose taxable net worth exceeded $20,000 (he still hated the Southern aristocracy). Yet any of them could ask for a presidential pardon, and soon the White House teemed with supplicants looking not just for pardons but patronage, which Johnson regally dispensed. By the following year, Secretary of State Seward reported 7,197 pardons with an additional 707 on the way. Johnson also called for a convention of loyal citizens (a citizen was anyone who had been eligible to vote in 1860, so freedmen were excluded) to be held in North Carolina, and he appointed William Holden as the state’s governor. He appointed governors in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, and Texas. In South Carolina, he put Benjamin Perry into the governor’s seat even though Perry had been in the Confederate legislature during the war.
Though Johnson remained leery of federal control and was a firm advocate of states’ rights, he had never acknowledged secession. As far as he was concerned, the eleven states of the Confederacy had not legally seceded, which also meant that the Southern states had not left the Union nor relinquished their right to govern themselves as they wished. For instance, in Mississippi, when the state legislature had recently convened, it had passed a set of ordinances known as the Black Codes, which effectively limited or took away the rights of the freedmen: it rewrote vagrancy laws to prevent freedmen and women moving from place to place in search of work; it mandated that former slaves prove residence and occupation by showing their contracts with employers or their licenses for self-employment; it consigned black orphans to unpaid labor; it outlawed ownership of any kind of weapon; it outlawed freedmen’s leasing farmland. Johnson also permitted the Mississippi legislature to raise a state militia (likely composed of Confederate veterans) to help enforce those codes, which in effect forced freedmen and women to return to the plantations where they were once enslaved, presumably as workers. Said a member of the 5th U.S. Colored Heavy Artillery, “They are doing all they can to prevent free labor and create a kind of secondary slavery.”
Mississippi wasn’t alone in creating codes designed to rob the rights of the freedmen. Sidney Andrews, a Northern reporter, said, “The whites seem wholly unable to comprehend that freedom for the negro means the same thing as freedom for them.” A chaplain in Beaufort, South Carolina, complained that the planters regarded the Emancipation Proclamation as a wartime—not a peacetime—measure and so rejected the very idea of free labor, undermining it however and wherever they could, with taxes, for example, levied on blacks who chose any occupation other than farming.
The Black Codes were but one form of social control. Violence and the threat of violence were another. In South Carolina more than a dozen Union men, black and white, had been killed in two months. Saxton reported that in the spring of 1865 the sons of some of the “first families” around Augusta, Georgia, had formed bands of guerrillas committed to the summary murder of freedmen not working on a nearby plantation. “We heard that a negro had been killed in town. Taken out by a band of disguised men at midnight,” a distressed South Carolina woman said. “An innocent, peaceable negro, taken from his frightened wife, taken out, tied, the house searched & then he was shot & left lying in the street next morning. The intention being to warn other negroes of danger perhaps.” When black soldiers, as well as some white ones, were also killed, the culprits were not pursued. In the meantime several states in addition to Mississippi formed their own (white) local militias with former Confederate soldiers among their ranks, their putative task to restore law and order and prevent uprisings—a Southern bogeyman—although the freedmen (and General Saxton) believed these so-called regulators were simply the bull
ying patrols of slavery days, now regrouped to subjugate and intimidate the black population.
Saxton guessed that those well-armed, well-organized regulators wanted him to disarm the freedmen (which Saxton would not do) in order to “have the whole black population unarmed and defenseless.” As it was, black troops lacked officers and were in any case being discharged from service, all the more so since Southerners had been complaining about their presence. “The Government is now pressed by the ex-Rebels to disband its Black soldiers forthwith,” explained the New-York Tribune. “But what is to become of these soldiers? Many if not most of them dare not return to the homes they left to enter the Union service. They know they would be hunted down and killed by their badly reconstructed White neighbors.” And as far as Saxton was concerned, the agents of the Freedmen’s Bureau were in danger too. “There are large numbers in South Carolina who would consider it no greater crime to kill an agent of the Freedmen’s Bureau, who claims justice for those committed to his charge, than to kill a negro.”
Yet Saxton persisted in helping the freedmen settle on land, start farms, create new colonies, and organize town governments. At a mass meeting in Savannah, he explained the meaning of titles, and afterward, in just one day, there were 5,000 acres assigned to the freedmen. Soon 40,000 people could be resettled on the property allotted them. “It was Plymouth colony repeating itself,” exulted a sympathetic reporter.
Meanwhile, former planters had been lobbying Johnson to return land confiscated by the federal government and nullify Sherman’s orders. Of course, the issue was not a simple one in any case: the question of whether confiscated land fell under the temporary or permanent jurisdiction of the federal government had not been resolved. To whom did the land belong? To the white planters who had abandoned it? What was the status of those planters? Had they been full-fledged citizens of the Union all along, or were they traitors who, once pardoned, were enfranchised members of the body politic? The freedmen were of course not any of those things; but did they have a moral claim and legal right to the land that they had worked for generations and that had been granted homesteading freedmen and women per Sherman’s Special Field Order No. 15?
NO FRIEND TO the freedman, President Johnson ordered General Howard to return the territory confiscated by the Treasury Department during the war, some 450,000 acres in all, to pardoned former Confederates even though freedmen had recently been resettled on much of it. Initially refusing to surrender abandoned or confiscated property to former rebels, even pardoned ones, Howard responded to Johnson’s Amnesty Proclamation with Circular No. 13. It urged Bureau commissioners to exclude the forty-acre tracts already given to the freedmen. Johnson rescinded Howard’s circular and again mandated that the land be restored to the now-pardoned former owners.
Saxton begrudgingly carried out the president’s directive where the lands were unoccupied or on the mainland under his jurisdiction (particularly in upcountry South Carolina and Georgia), but he refused to dispossess the freedmen of their property in the Sea Islands. “I should break faith with the freedmen now by recommending the restoration of these lands,” he hotly declared. “In my view, this order of General Sherman [Special Field Order No. 15] is as binding as a statute.” Without a special order from Washington, he therefore refused the peremptory demands of former Charleston rebels to restore their land, and he protested to Howard, pointing out that the freedmen of the Sea Islands had raised more than $300,000 worth of cotton and had deposited almost $250,000 in the Freedmen’s Savings Bank.
Over Saxton’s protests, the cotton crop had been shipped to New York to be sold by the Treasury Department, which retained the proceeds from its sale. And with lands being returned to the former white owners, Saxton had no more sources of income with which to staff his huge district with agents or buy provisions, whether blankets, shoes, food, or medicine. One physician commented in anger that he thought the military “have conspired together not to furnish us but to drive us away.” In Georgia, Saxton’s agent, John Emory Bryant, who superintended the freedmen in the Augusta area, said that no doctors would staff the hospital he’d set up. Many freedmen of the Sea Islands were fleeing to places such as Savannah, which already teemed with refugees who had no clothes, no shelter, no work, no prospects.
More soldiers were going home, leaving General Saxton understaffed. Besides, many of the military men now sent South were far more prejudiced than the former rebels. So it also seemed to Laura Towne, a teacher in the Sea Islands, who noted that they “only care to make the blacks work—being quite unconcerned about making the employers pay.”
White folk who had supported the Union weren’t much better off. “Yankees and negroes are all the rage,” a former planter from Hilton Head spat out in disgust. Traveling south after the war, Whitelaw Reid listened to Unionists in Atlanta explain, “We are in no sense upheld or encouraged by the Government. Public sentiment is against us because we opposed the war; or, as they said, because we were tories; but, when the Government triumphed, we were secure because we were on the winning side. But you pardon Howell Cobb and every other leading secessionist; they at once become the natural leaders in an overwhelmingly secessionist community; and we, through mistaken kindness of our own Government, are worse ostracized to-day, in the new order of things, than we were during the war.”
On October 19, 1865, General Saxton had to give up his fight against the government and “break the sad news to the people that they must lose their lands.” Before the week was out, it was rumored that the “high-toned chivalry” of South Carolina had gone so far as to pressure Johnson to get rid of Saxton, which Johnson was happy to do although, for the moment, Stanton was backing him. Other military brass closely allied with the president, such as General James Fullerton, soon won Howard and Stanton to their side by inveighing against Saxton and others who worked with him in the Bureau. It was said that the black leader Martin Delany, for instance, had recently called a meeting to tell “the negroes in public speeches that the lands that they have been working upon belong to them and they should have it.” Saxton and such men, it was said, were rabble-rousers who not only wanted to redistribute land to the freedmen but, even more dangerously, advocated radical measures such as universal suffrage.
For a short while General Howard tried to conciliate everyone, but he couldn’t do it, for he had acceded to the Johnsonian idea that freedmen should go back to work for their former masters under lopsided employment contracts that bound them to a form of servitude not unlike slavery. The freedmen were punished if they broke the contracts; the white men were not. (In Mississippi, freedmen were not permitted to buy land.) And so with no land forthcoming (or having been taken away) and no jobs, they did return to work for the planters and, at best, became sharecroppers in the new labor system.
When, in 1866, Congress passed the Southern Homestead Act, it did set aside 40 million acres of poor soil in five Southern states for purchase by loyal whites or freed blacks; but former slaves had no money to buy the land, so they often had to work other people’s farms. Corralled into gangs not unlike what men and women endured during slavery, they received, instead of wages, a tiny share of the crops—to be divided among the entire labor force. In addition, all too frequently planters or merchants extended credit at high interest to the sharecropper for supplies or equipment or took a lien on the coming crop; the lien only perpetuated a cycle of indebtedness and poverty, generation after generation.
To a Southerner writing in DeBow’s Review, however, these freedmen were a lazy bunch, mostly drunk, defiant, and well armed—as well as deluded by the promises of such men as General Saxton. Thwarted in his efforts to redistribute land (particularly on the mainland) and painfully aware that pardoned Southerners were flocking back to it, Saxton had instituted a system of short-term labor contracts to protect the freedmen from exploitation. But freedmen often refused to work for the planters for fear they would not be paid and worse: “The negro believes that his former master wishes to ma
ke him a slave again, and has no confidence in his promises,” he pointed out. “He desires particularly not to make any contract or to work for his old master, preferring to work for northern men. Northern men can get all the labor they require, with capital; but not so with the former slaveholders; the only way this feeling can be broken down and a mutual confidence restored is to give the negro all his rights.” Yet according to the Southerner, by providing the Sea Islanders with land and then employment contracts, Saxton had sowed discontent among them; they now petulantly refused to sign contracts or to work: such was the result of “this unnecessary and unnatural disturbance of their proper [black and white] relations.”
In December 1865 the weary but determined Saxton proposed that Congress appropriate sufficient funds to purchase all the estates seized under Sherman’s Special Field Order No. 15 and that it offer the former white owners a choice of receiving a fair price for the property or the property itself; if the latter, congressional funds should be given as long-term loans to freedmen wishing to purchase farmland elsewhere. His proposal was ignored. Commanded to set up a board of white men to oversee contractual arrangements between landowners and freedmen, Saxton then outraged the whites by appointing a black man, who declared that he wouldn’t approve any contracts and nothing but ownership of land would satisfy the freedmen. The lawyer and former Confederate officer William Whaley loudly declared he would rather his lands “sink to perdition than a black man compose one of the Board.” Other white men, among them former governor William Aiken (once a major slave owner), Benjamin Perry (the present governor), and a planter and former slave owner, William Henry Trescot, lobbied President Johnson to fire Saxton. “Here is the proof,” said Trescot, “of the utter impossibility of doing anything as long as he controls the department of the bureau.”
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