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James T. Rapier (November 13, 1837–May 31, 1883) Born to free parents in Florence, Alabama. Educated in Canada. Returned to Alabama after the Civil War. Member of the state constitutional convention in 1867. Founded the Republican State Sentinel, the first black-owned newspaper in Alabama. Elected to Congress as a Republican and served 1873–75. Defeated for reelection in 1874 in campaign marked by white supremacist violence and intimidation. Unsuccessful candidate for Congress in 1876. Served as a collector of internal revenue in Alabama, 1878–83. Founded Haynesville Times in 1878 and used it to advocate black migration to the western states.
Carl Schurz (March 2, 1829–May 14, 1906) Born in Liblar-am-Rhein, Germany. Immigrated to the United States in 1852. U.S. minister to Spain, 1861–62. Served as officer in the Union army, 1862–65, and was promoted to major general of volunteers. Republican senator from Missouri, 1869–75. Helped lead the Liberal Republican movement in 1872. Secretary of the interior in the Rutherford B. Hayes administration, 1877–81. Editor of the New York Evening Post, 1881–84.
Robert K. Scott (July 8, 1826–August 12, 1900) Born in Armstrong County, Pennsylvania. Moved to Ohio after U.S.-Mexican War. Officer in Union army, 1861–65; appointed brigadier general of volunteers in 1865. Assistant commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau for South Carolina, 1866–68. Republican governor of South Carolina, 1868–72. Returned to Ohio, 1877.
Philip H. Sheridan (March 6, 1831–August 6, 1881) Born in Albany, New York. Graduated from West Point in 1853. Served as officer in U.S. army, 1853–61. Promoted to brigadier general of volunteers, 1862, and major general, 1863–64, commissioned major general in regular army, 1864. Commanded occupation forces in Louisiana and Texas, 1865–67. Directed campaigns against southern Plains Indians, 1867–69. Commanded army west of the Mississippi, 1869–83. Commanding general of the army from 1883 until his death.
Charles C. Soule (June 25, 1842–January 7, 1913) Born in Boston. Graduated from Harvard College, 1862. Served as lieutenant in the 44th Massachusetts Infantry, 1862–63, and as a captain in the 55th Massachusetts Infantry, commanding black soldiers, 1863–65. Assigned to the Freedmen’s Bureau in South Carolina until August 1865, when he was mustered out of the army. Established successful business selling law books in Boston, 1881.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton (November 12, 1815–October 26, 1902) Born in Johnstown, New York. Helped organize the women’s rights convention held in Seneca Falls, New York, in July 1848 and drafted its “Declaration of Rights and Sentiments.” President of the Woman’s State Temperance Society, 1852–53. Advocated women’s rights in appearances before the New York legislature in 1854 and 1860. Organized petition drive with Susan B. Anthony in support of the Thirteenth Amendment, 1863–64. First vice president of the American Equal Rights Association, 1866–68. Edited weekly newspaper Revolution, 1868–70. President of the National Woman Suffrage Association, 1869–70 and 1877–90, and of its successor, the National American Woman Suffrage Association, 1890–92. Edited History of Woman Suffrage (3 vols., 1881–86) with Anthony and Matilda Joslyn Gage.
George L. Stearns (January 8, 1809–April 9, 1867) Born in Medford, Massachusetts. Established successful business manufacturing lead pipe, 1841. Financial supporter of the Free Soil Party in 1848 and helped found Republican Party in Massachusetts. Purchased arms for free-state settlers in Kansas and secretly supported John Brown’s plan for a slave uprising in Virginia. Helped recruit black troops for the Union army. Published The Right Way, weekly newspaper that supported black manhood suffrage, 1865–67.
Thaddeus Stevens (April 4, 1792–August 11, 1868) Born in Danville, Vermont. Moved to Pennsylvania in 1815 and was admitted to the bar in 1816. Served in Congress as an antislavery Whig, 1849–53, and as a Republican from 1859 until his death. Chairman of the managers chosen by the House of Representatives to present the case against President Andrew Johnson at his impeachment trial in 1868.
George Stoneman (August 22, 1822–September 5, 1894) Born in Busti, New York. Graduated from West Point in 1846. Served as officer in the U.S. army, 1846–61, as brigadier general in Union army, 1861–62, and as major general, 1862–66. Mustered out of volunteer service in 1866 and became colonel in postwar army. Served as Reconstruction military commander in Virginia, June 1868–March 1869. Retired from army in 1871 after being relieved of his command in Arizona by President Grant for failing to prevent massacre of Apaches under military protection at Camp Grant. Democratic governor of California, 1883–87.
Charles Sumner (January 6, 1811–March 11, 1874) Born in Boston, Massachusetts. Graduated from Harvard College in 1830 and Harvard Law School in 1833. Elected to the U.S. Senate as a Free Soiler in 1851. Badly beaten with a cane on the Senate floor by South Carolina congressman Preston Brooks on May 22, 1856, two days after delivering his antislavery speech “The Crime Against Kansas.” Reelected as a Republican in 1857, but did not return to his seat in the Senate until December 1859. Reelected in 1863 and 1869 and served until his death. Joined Liberal Republicans in opposing the reelection of President Grant in 1872.
Albion W. Tourgée (May 2, 1838–May 21, 1905) Born in Williamsfield, Ohio. Enlisted in 27th New York Infantry in 1861. Suffered serious spinal injury during retreat from Bull Run. Served as lieutenant in the 105th Ohio Infantry, 1862–63; fought at Perryville and Chickamauga. Resigned commission after reinjuring back. Moved to Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1865 and opened law practice. Delegate to Southern Loyalist Convention held in Philadelphia, 1866. Edited weekly newspaper Greensboro Union Register, 1866–67. Delegate to the state constitutional conventions in 1868 and 1875. Elected as a state superior court judge in 1868 and served until 1874. Published novel Tionette (1874). Served as federal pension agent, 1875–77. Unsuccessful Republican candidate for Congress, 1878. Left North Carolina in 1879 and eventually settled in Maysville, New York. Published novels A Fool’s Errand (1879) and Bricks Without Straw (1880), set in North Carolina during Reconstruction, and The Invisible Empire (1880), a documentary account of the Ku Klux Klan. Edited literary weekly Our Continent, 1881–84. Continued to publish novels and essays, including An Appeal to Caesar (1884), an examination of American race relations. Advocated racial equality, national support for public schools, and antilynching legislation in weekly column for the Chicago Daily Inter-Ocean, 1888–98. Served as lead attorney for Homer Plessy in Louisiana railroad segregation case Plessy v. Ferguson, decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1896. Appointed U.S. consul in Bordeaux, France, in 1897 and served until his death.
Cynthia Townsend A freed woman who testified in 1866 before a congressional investigating committee about the recent Memphis massacre.
Mark Twain (November 30, 1835–April 21, 1910) Born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in Florida, Missouri. Worked as typesetter and occasional writer for newspapers in Missouri, New York, Iowa, and Ohio, 1851–56. Riverboat pilot on the Mississippi, 1857–61. Wrote for newspapers in Nevada, 1862–64, and California, 1864–66. Visited Europe and the Holy Land, 1867. Owned one-third interest in the Buffalo Express, 1869–72. Published numerous travel narratives and novels, including The Innocents Abroad (1869), Roughing It (1872), The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), and Puddn’head Wilson (1894).
Elihu B. Washburne (September 23, 1816–October 23, 1887) Born in Livermore, Maine. Admitted to bar in 1840 and began legal practice in Galena, Illinois. Served in Congress as a Whig, and then as a Republican, 1853–69. Served as secretary of state for eleven days at the beginning of the Grant administration, March 1869. U.S. minister to France, 1869–77.
Thomas Whitehead (December 27, 1825–July 1, 1901) Born in Lovingston, Virginia. Admitted to the bar in 1849. Served in Confederate army as an officer in the 2nd Virginia Cavalry, 1861–65. Elected commonwealth attorney of Amherst County, Virginia, 1866; removed from office by military governor, 1868; reelected in 1869 and served until 1873. Elected to Congress as a Conservative (Democrat) and ser
ved, 1873–75. Virginia commissioner of agriculture, 1888–1901.
Sarah J. C. Whittlesey (1825–1896) Born in Williamston, North Carolina. Moved to Alexandria, Virginia, in 1848. Published poetry, stories, and novels, including Heart-Drops from Memory’s Urn (1852), The Stranger’s Stratagem, or, The Double Deceit, and other stories (1860), Bertha, the Beauty: A Story of the Southern Revolution (1871), and Spring Buds and Summer Blossoms (1889).
J. A. Williamson A landowner in Fayette County, Tennessee, who wrote to the Freedmen’s Bureau in 1865 regarding the freed people in his county.
John Russell Young (November 20, 1840–January 17, 1899) Born in County Tyrone, Ireland. Immigrated to the United States in 1841. Began working for the Philadelphia Press in 1857. Reported on the Civil War in Virginia, 1861–62. Served as managing editor of the Press and the Washington Chronicle, 1862–65. Managing editor of the New-York Tribune, 1866–69. Editor of the New York Standard, 1870–72. Became European correspondent for the New York Herald in 1872. Accompanied Ulysses S. Grant on his world tour, 1877–79, and published Around the World with General Grant (1879). U.S. minister to China, 1882–85. Served as Librarian of Congress, 1897–99.
Note on the Texts
This volume collects nineteenth-century American writing about Reconstruction, bringing together speeches, public and private letters, messages, addresses, government reports, petitions, interviews, congressional resolutions, testimony given in court and before congressional committees, newspaper and magazine articles, diary entries, memoranda, and excerpts from travel narratives written by participants and observers and dealing with events in the period from 1865 to 1879. Some of these documents were not written for publication, and some of them existed only in manuscript form during the lifetimes of the persons who wrote them. With one exception, the texts presented in this volume are taken from printed sources. In cases where there is only one printed source for a document, the text offered here comes from that source. Where there is more than one printed source for a document, the text printed in this volume is taken from the source that appears to contain the fewest editorial alterations in the spelling, capitalization, paragraphing, and punctuation of the original. In one instance where no printed source was available, the text in this volume is printed from a manuscript.
This volume prints texts as they appear in the sources listed below, but with a few alterations in editorial procedure. The bracketed conjectural readings of editors, in cases where original manuscripts or printed texts were damaged or difficult to read, are accepted without brackets in this volume. In cases where an obvious slip of the pen in a manuscript was marked by earlier editors with “[sic],” the present volume omits the “[sic]” and corrects the slip of the pen. In instances where earlier editors supplied in brackets letters or words that were omitted from the source text by an obvious slip of the pen or printer’s error, this volume removes the brackets and accepts the editorial emendation. Bracketed editorial insertions used in the source texts to identify persons, or to supply dates and locations, have been deleted in this volume. In instances where canceled, but still legible, words were printed in the source texts with lines through the deleted material, or where canceled words were printed within angled brackets, this volume omits the canceled words.
The text of the editorial on amnesty by Horace Greeley printed in the New-York Tribune on March 16, 1871, placed quotation marks at the beginning of every line of a quoted passage as well as at its beginning and end. This volume provides quotation marks only at the beginning and ending of a quoted passage.
Three typesetting errors that appeared in the printed source texts are corrected in this volume: at 26.35, “as those were who” becomes “as those who were”; at 423.21, “tell him right down” becomes “tell him write down”; at 433.40, “our fears our groundless” becomes “our fears are groundless.” Two slips of the pen in the document printed from manuscript are also corrected: at 71.29, “will be recieved” becomes “will be received,” and at 72.31, “other wrongs to numerous” becomes “other wrongs too numerous.” Four errors in the letter written by Charles C. Soule to Oliver O. Howard on June 12, 1865, and in the enclosed address to the freed people of the Orangeburg District, are treated as slips of the pen and corrected in this volume, even though they were not corrected in Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867, Series 3, Volume 1: Land and Labor, 1865: at 37.20, “away with. Some well” becomes “away with, some well”; at 37.24–25, “done in theory. the system” becomes “done in theory, the system”; at 39.29, “waiting too much” becomes “wanting too much”; at 40.5, “for his family. and” becomes “for his family, and.”
The following is a list of the documents included in this volume, in the order of their appearance, giving the source of each text. The most common sources are indicated by these abbreviations:
Advice
Advice After Appomattox: Letters to Andrew Johnson, 1865–1866, ed. Brooks D. Simpson, Leroy P. Graf, and John Muldowny (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1987). Copyright © 1987 by The University of Tennessee Press.
PAJ
The Papers of Andrew Johnson, ed. LeRoy P. Graf, Ralph W. Haskins, and Paul H. Bergeron (16 vols., Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1967–2000). Volume 8 (1989), Volume 9 (1991), Volume 10 (1992), Volume 11 (1994), ed. Paul H. Bergeron. Copyright © 1989, 1991, 1992, 1994 by The University of Tennessee Press.
PUSG
The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, ed. John Y. Simon and John F. Marszalek (32 vols. to date, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967–2012). Volume 20 (1995), Volume 25 (2003), Volume 26 (2003), Volume 27 (2005), Volume 28 (2005), ed. John Y. Simon. Copyright © 1995, 2003, 2005 by the Ulysses S. Grant Association. Reprinted with the permission of the Ulysses S. Grant Association.
Richardson
A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 1789–1902, ed. James D. Richardson (11 vols., New York: Bureau of National Literature and Art, 1902–4). Volume VI (1903), Volume VII (1903).
SPTS
The Selected Papers of Thaddeus Stevens, ed. Beverly Wilson Palmer and Holly Byers Ochoa (2 vols., University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997–98). Volume 2 (1998). Copyright © 1998 by University of Pittsburgh Press.
Tourgée
Undaunted Radical: The Selected Writings and Speeches of Albion W. Tourgée, ed. Mark Elliott and John David Smith (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010). Copyright © 2010 by Louisiana State University Press. Reprinted with permission.
PRESIDENTIAL RECONSTRUCTION, 1865–1866
Frederick Douglass: What the Black Man Wants, January 26, 1865. Equality of all men before the law claimed and defended; in speeches by Hon. William D. Kelley, Wendell Phillips, and Frederick Douglass, and letters from Elizur Wright and Wm. Heighton (Boston: Press of Geo. C. Rand & Avery, 1865), 36–39.
Abraham Lincoln: Speech on Reconstruction, Washington, DC, April 11, 1865. Abraham Lincoln: Speeches and Writings, 1859–1865, ed. Don E. Fehrenbacher (New York: Library of America, 1989), 697–701. Copyright © 1953 by The Abraham Lincoln Association. Reprinted with permission.
Springfield Republican: Restoration of the Union, April 20, 1865. The Frankfort Commonwealth, April 21, 1865.
Andrew Johnson: Interview with Pennsylvania Delegation, May 3, 1865. PAJ, vol. 8, 21–23.
Colored Men of North Carolina to Andrew Johnson, May 10, 1865. PAJ, vol. 8, 57–58.
Andrew Johnson: Reply to a Delegation of Colored Ministers, May 11, 1865. PAJ, vol. 8, 61–62.
Salmon P. Chase to Andrew Johnson, May 12, 1865. Advice, 23–25.
Joseph Noxon to Andrew Johnson, May 27, 1865. PAJ, vol. 8, 119.
Delegation of Kentucky Colored People to Andrew Johnson, June 9, 1865. PAJ, vol. 8, 203–5.
Charles C. Soule and Oliver O. Howard: An Exchange, June 12 and 21, 1865. Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867. Series 3, Volume 1: Land and Labor, 1865, ed. Steve Hahn, Steven F
. Miller, Susan E. O’Donovan, John C. Rodrigue, and Leslie S. Rowland (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 215–22. Copyright © 2008 by The University of North Carolina Press. Reprinted with permission of The University of North Carolina Press, www.uncpress.unc.edu.
Richard Henry Dana: Speech at Boston, June 21, 1865. Speech of Richard H. Dana, Jr., at a meeting of citizens held in Faneuil Hall: June 21, 1865, to consider the subject of re-organization of the rebel states (Boston, MA: 1865), 1–4.
Charles Sumner to Gideon Welles, July 4, 1865. The Selected Letters of Charles Sumner, Volume II, ed. Beverly Wilson Palmer (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1990), 313–15. Copyright © 1990 by Beverly Wilson Palmer; copyright © 1990 by University Press of New England, Lebanon, NH.
Wendell Phillips to the National Anti-Slavery Standard. National Anti-Slavery Standard, July 8, 1865.
Francis Preston Blair to Andrew Johnson, August 1, 1865. PAJ, vol. 8, 516–23.
Colored People of Mobile to Andrew J. Smith, August 2, 1865. Records of the Assistant Commissioner for Alabama, Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, 1865–1870, RG 105, National Archives Microfilm Publication M809, Roll 23 (Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration, 1969).
Jourdon Anderson to P. H. Anderson, August 7, 1865. New-York Daily Tribune, August 22, 1865.