A Just and Lasting Peace: A Documentary History of Reconstruction
Page 2
Some scholars interpret the postwar years as a continuation of the war, as Americans north and south confronted the obstacles of restoring the Union, generating new battles over sovereignty, representation, and race relations. Though armed conflict between Union and Confederate forces ground to a halt in April 1865, over the next dozen years new forms of violence—including murder, mob beatings, urban race riots, and guerrilla warfare in the countryside directed against blacks and Unionists—vexed the period that historians term Reconstruction. “The belligerence of Southern leaders did not end with Appomattox,” explains historian John Stauffer. “They neither laid down their arms nor accepted the terms of their unconditional surrender. Instead they went home and engaged in a terrorist war for the next twelve years.”7
This book is the first major documentary history of Reconstruction since the early twentieth century when historian Walter Lynwood Fleming published his popular two-volume Documentary History of Reconstruction: Political, Military, Social, Religious, Educational, and Industrial, 1865 to 1906 (1906–7).8 Fleming, trained in Professor William Archibald Dunning’s famous Columbia University history seminar, underscored slavery’s righteousness, the inherent inferiority of African-Americans, and what historian Robert D. Reid termed “the noble purposes of the white South, and the deleterious effects of Reconstruction.”9
The documents in A Just and Lasting Peace reflect all sides of the Reconstruction experience—constitutional, economic, legal, social, and, above all, the pull and tug of human adjustment during the post–Civil War years. But whereas Fleming’s excerpted texts combined to depict Reconstruction as an exceptional, extreme, radical moment in American history, the documents in A Just and Lasting Peace highlight the inertia and the limitations on politicians and reformers determined to remake the South and, in doing so, to transform the nation into a biracial representative democracy predicated on true freedom and citizenship. The historical texts included in A Just and Lasting Peace also reflect Foner’s “rejuvenated revisionism” captured in his path-breaking and influential Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (1988).10 As historian Gregory P. Downs has noted correctly, Foner, without dismissing the ideals and contributions of white Northern reformers and Republicans, showcased the agency and experiences of the ex-slaves during the postwar period. Foner and those historians who have followed him, most notably Steven Hahn in A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggle in the South from Slavery to the Great Migration (2003), have emphasized the emancipated slaves’ determination for full freedom, including economic autonomy and citizenship on a par with whites. They underscore Reconstruction as a nonlinear historical process with many twists and turns, but nevertheless identify a leitmotif in the hopes and dreams of blacks, who, during the dozen years following the war, acted as agents of their own economic, political, and social freedom.11
Reconstruction, a critical period of American history that began during the Civil War and continued into the 1880s, remains an amazingly complex and complicated historical epoch, a watershed in American political, social, cultural, and economic history. For scholars, the period presents a many-headed hydra. Reconstruction signified an end to the Civil War and, after a stormy interlude, led to the readmission of the former Confederate states to the Union. But it also represented an experiment in economic, social, and political democracy—America’s first civil rights movement—and, ultimately, it launched a new beginning for Americans north and south. Significantly, Reconstruction marked the end of an era: the end of slavery, the end of the so-called “slavocracy,” and the end of the serious idea of state interposition and secession in American politics. Yet, as much as Reconstruction signaled a termination point, it also marked a new beginning. With Reconstruction, Americans commenced a period of experimentation in interracial democracy—a period of civil and political rights for the freedmen, a period of strong federalism, and a new nationalism. Each was tested.
Revisionist scholars of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, responding to the traditional, or “tragic era,” interpretation of Dunning-era historians like Fleming, approached the period sympathetically and optimistically. These historians highlighted Reconstruction’s triumphs. “If the era was ‘tragic,’ revisionists insisted, it was because change did not go far enough, especially in the area of Southern land reform,” Foner explained, but Reconstruction was still “a time of extraordinary social and political progress for blacks.”12
Disappointed by the slow pace of racial change during the Second Reconstruction of the 1960s, historians in the 1970s and 1980s, whom Foner terms “postrevisionists,” viewed the so-called gains of Reconstruction skeptically and went to great lengths to describe the period’s essential conservatism, whether in terms of land distribution, in the courts, or in the persistence of white planter economic, racial, and social control. According to Foner, “The postrevisionist interpretation represented a striking departure from nearly all previous accounts of the period, for whatever their differences, traditional and revisionist historians at least agreed that reconstruction was a time of radical change.”13 Prior to the appearance of Foner’s book, most scholars emphasized the limitations of reuniting the nation occasioned by Northern racism, capitalism, and politics.
Foner, as Downs points out, revitalized the 1950s revisionist interpretation by privileging not only the accomplishments but also the struggles of the freedpeople. Reconstruction did not signify a triumph of egalitarianism over entrenched racism, state-rights particularism, and economic control by wealthy agricultural and urban capitalists. But Reconstruction nonetheless was not a totally failed experiment.
The Thirteenth Amendment (ratified 1865) freed the slaves permanently by law, not by military order; the Fourteenth Amendment (ratified 1868) defined American citizenship to include African-Americans and included penalties for states that denied citizenship rights; and the Fifteenth Amendment (ratified 1870) enfranchised black men. Beyond this, probably as many as 1,800 blacks held public office—as congressmen, state legislators, constables, trial justices, and other local officials—during the Reconstruction era.14 Many African-Americans served in all-black militia companies while others began commercial and communal enterprises that served their communities, some continuing today. That said, even before the 1870s, many of the early gains of Reconstruction began to wither away, returning former Confederates to power, ushering in white racial control, and rendering most of the freedmen and -women to the status of landless peasants.
Ironically, as white Southerners reentered the Union, they seemingly captured in peace what had eluded them in war: newfound racial control, not by slavery, but rather by controlling the region’s capital and land. Farm tenantry, sharecropping, and peonage replaced the racial control of slavery without providing the freedpeople with any of the alleged benefits of chattel slavery. Whites fashioned so-called free labor into an effective mode of labor and racial control. In 1879, Albion W. Tourgée, the Union officer–turned–North Carolina carpetbagger, lawyer, judge, and leading novelist, critic, and racial radical, remarked, “In all except the actual results of the physical struggle, I consider the South to have been the real victors in the war. . . . The way in which they have neutralized the results of the war and reversed the verdict of Appomattox is the grandest thing in American politics.”15
This story and many others play out in the documents presented in A Just and Lasting Peace. The texts, arranged chronologically, provide insights into the ebb and flow of the emancipation process, debates over programs of “restoration” versus “reconstruction,” Presidential Reconstruction and its reversal, then Radical Reconstruction and its eventual retreat. The powerful first-person accounts document the oft-sidetracked project of reuniting the nation after a blood-soaked civil war and the construction of new nationhood. The Civil War and Reconstruction freed the slaves, included African-Americans as citizens, and enabled blacks to vote and participate in political activities. Even though blac
k agency sparked obstructionism by whites at every turn and culminated in decades of racially motivated violence, Reconstruction nevertheless settled the question of state rights versus federalism, establishing the ultimate locus of power in the United States in the federal government, not in the states. Concomitantly, Reconstruction witnessed the enormous growth of central state government authority in the North, what historian Richard Franklin Bensel appropriately termed the emerging “Yankee Leviathan.”16
Despite Reconstruction’s gains, and the courage and conviction of reformers black and white, North and South, the postwar period fell short of true biracial justice and representative democracy. State centralization had little direct impact on the day-to-day lives of the South’s ex-slaves. No sooner had the smoke of battle between Northerners and Southerners cleared but proscription, intolerance, and racial tension began to hover over the Reconstruction South like a miasma, choking the freedmen and -women as they marched determinedly ahead toward true freedom. The Black Codes of Presidential Reconstruction first blocked their path. Then extra-legal violence threatened the exercise of the freedmen’s newfound political rights. De facto segregation circumscribed their social interactions. And finally, starting soon after Reconstruction ground to a halt in 1877, Southern states began codifying Jim Crow–era segregation laws. “The destruction of slavery,” notes historian Edward L. Ayres, “a major moral accomplishment of the United States Army, of Abraham Lincoln, and of the enslaved people themselves, would be overshadowed by the injustice and poverty that followed in the rapidly changing South, a mockery of American claims of moral leadership in the world.”17 Reflecting in 1935 on the gains and losses of Reconstruction, the great African-American historian and sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois explained: “The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.”18 Universal freedom and equality proved elusive.
A Just and Lasting Peace uses period documents to introduce Reconstruction’s complex history and long-term meaning to a new generation of readers. Writing in 2000, Foner remarked, “Reconstruction remains perhaps the most controversial and least understood era of American history.” Understanding the postwar years remains essential for Americans, however, as “long as the issues central to Reconstruction remain unresolved—the balance of power in the federal system, the place of black Americans in national life, and the relationship between economic and political democracy.”19
PART I
WARTIME RECONSTRUCTION
The Reconstruction process began years before Confederate defeat. In fact, President Lincoln took steps to prepare for Reconstruction as early as 1862. In that year, Lincoln proclaimed emancipation for bondsmen and -women in the District of Columbia and, after issuing his Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation in September 1862, on January 1, 1863, he issued the Final Emancipation Proclamation. This order only freed blacks then in Confederate-held territory, but nonetheless signified a radical first step in the experiment that became Reconstruction, suggesting civil and political equality for people of color and allowing blacks into the military to fight alongside white soldiers. By war’s end, roughly 200,000 black soldiers and sailors wore the Union blue. Historian Eric Foner notes that African-Americans who served in the army and navy during the Civil War composed a leadership class during Reconstruction. They held at least 129 public offices in the postwar years.20
Foner also observes that the Final Emancipation Proclamation created a turning point in the course of the Civil War, but it did not immediately address the divisive question of Reconstruction. Rather, the Proclamation created more problems, as it ensured that after the war, the political social structure of the South would be fundamentally and dramatically altered forever. The questions thus raised included who would mandate the changes in Southern society and what shape they would take. What would be the role of blacks in Southern society once they became freedmen?
Lincoln took the first step in reconstructing the Union when, on December 8, 1863, he issued the Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction. He declared that insurgents who agreed to swear an oath of loyalty to the U.S. Constitution and who would accept emancipation would receive full pardons. Once ten percent of a rebellious state’s 1860 electorate had agreed to these terms and took the oath, Lincoln specified, the state could reenter the U.S. after reestablishing a republican government. This offer of amnesty excluded certain classes of individuals, including Confederate military officers, high government officials, and members of the U.S. government or military who had resigned their posts to aid the slaveholders’ rebellion. Lincoln proposed a conservative Reconstruction plan, hopeful that it would attract moderate former Southern Whigs and make the process of restoration occur smoothly. The president purposely avoided the question of black suffrage in his so-called Ten Percent Plan, hoping that allowing Southern Whigs to oversee the process of transitioning from a slave economy to a free-labor economy would serve as a viable concession to Southern Unionists. Although the provisions of Lincoln’s Proclamation of Amnesty never came to pass, it set a precedent that the Executive branch of government, not the Legislative branch, would regulate and direct the Reconstruction process.
The Radical Republicans, the wing of the president’s party that had shunned compromise with the Confederates before secession and that pressed for emancipation following Fort Sumter, considered Lincoln’s Ten Percent Plan too accommodating and lenient. Determined to reorganize the South and implement black equality, in July 1864 two leading Radicals, Senator Benjamin F. Wade of Ohio and Representative Henry Winter Davis of Maryland, passed a congressional bill as an alternate to the president’s Ten Percent Plan.
Under the terms of the Wade-Davis Bill, Reconstruction and the reintegration of the rebellious states into the Union required that once hostilities ceased in a state, a majority (not ten percent) of the state’s citizens take a loyalty oath. Those persons who could attest to past and future loyalty to the Union could then elect a convention to amend their state constitutions to abolish slavery, disfranchise Confederate military officers, and declare their state’s war debt invalid. Lincoln, determined to lead the Reconstruction process and to provide a smooth transition for willing former Confederate states to rejoin the Union, pocket vetoed the Wade-Davis plan on July 8, 1864. He hoped that the restoration (including the abolition of slavery) of Union governments in Louisiana and Arkansas under his Ten Percent Plan would establish a model for reconstructing the remaining Confederate states, and also that a Constitutional amendment would end slavery permanently. Lincoln’s veto exacerbated the growing rift between Congressional Radicals and the president. Responding to his pocket veto, on August 5, 1864, Wade and Davis published a manifesto in the New York Tribune, condemning Lincoln for overstepping his authority regarding Reconstruction. Wade and Davis insisted that Reconstruction was the province of the Legislative branch, a concern solely within the scope of congressional authority. They implored the president to execute and obey, not make laws. Yet, as Foner notes, “Despite the harsh language of the Wade-Davis Manifesto, these events did not signal an irreparable breach between Lincoln and the Radical Republicans. The points of unity among Republicans, especially their commitment to winning the war and rendering emancipation unassailable, were far greater than their differences.”21
In assessing the rival wartime Reconstruction plans, historian James M. McPherson notes that in reality, among the Rebel states only Tennessee could have met the prerequisites set by Wade and Davis. According to McPherson, “The real purpose of the Wade-Davis bill was to postpone Reconstruction until the war was won. Lincoln, by contrast, wanted to initiate Reconstruction immediately in order to convert lukewarm Confederates into Unionists as a means of winning the war.”22
“AN ACT FOR THE RELEASE OF CERTAIN PERSONS HELD TO SERVICE OR LABOR IN THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA”
(April 16, 1862)
For decades, abolitionists and other critics of slavery underscored the shame of slavery
existing in the nation’s capital. On April 16, 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed a bill ending slavery in the District of Columbia. It provided for immediate emancipation, compensation of up to three hundred dollars per slave belonging to loyal (Union) masters, and for the voluntary colonization of the freedpeople outside the United States. The bill suggests that notwithstanding Lincoln’s denials that abolition was to be an outcome of the war, almost nine months before he issued the Emancipation Proclamation the president had established freeing the slaves as one of his war aims.
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That all persons held to service or labor within the District of Columbia by reason of African descent are hereby discharged and freed of and from all claim to such service or labor; and from and after the passage of this act neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except for crime, whereof the party shall be duly convicted, shall hereafter exist in said District.
Sec. 2. And be it further enacted, That all persons loyal to the United States, holding claims to service or labor against persons discharged therefrom by this act, may, within ninety days from the passage thereof, but not thereafter, present to the commissioners hereinafter mentioned their respective statements or petitions in writing, verified by oath or affirmation, setting forth the names, ages, and personal description of such persons, the manner in which said petitioners acquired such claim, and any facts touching the value thereof, and declaring his allegiance to the Government of the United States, and that he has not borne arms against the United States during the present rebellion, nor in any way given aid or comfort thereto: Provided, That the oath of the party to the petition shall not be evidence of the facts therein stated.