The Age of Lincoln and the Art of American Power, 1848-1876
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The people of Washington City celebrated the war’s end by cheering the largest parade of raw military power in the nation’s history. It took two eight-hour days for two hundred thousand victorious troops to march down Pennsylvania Avenue from the Capitol to the White House, with Gen. Gordon Meade’s Army of the Potomac passing on May 23 and Gen. William Sherman’s Army of the Tennessee the next day. In the reviewing stand scores of prominent people joined President Andrew Johnson and Gen. Ulysses Grant to watch the astonishing procession.
The more thoughtful among Americans pondered the costs of victory. The rebellion was crushed and the nation was reunited at the official toll of 617,528 lives, of which the Union lost 364,511 and the Confederacy 253,017; the actual number of soldiers and civilians who died was recently estimated to have surpassed 750,000. Another one million men from both sides were wounded, with hundreds of thousands crippled physically and emotionally. As in all wars up to the twentieth century, germs were deadlier than bullets—among official Union soldier deaths, battle killed 110,070 and disease 249,498, or together one in six of the 2,213,363 men who served in the Union army. The Confederate losses were even more horrendous. Of the million southerners who fought for the rebel cause, one-quarter died and another quarter were wounded.3
Table 1. Federal spending and debt (in millions of dollars)
The North’s military, economic, and ideological triumph was as dearly bought in treasure as in blood. The cumulative military, nonmilitary, and total federal budgets from 1861 to 1865 were $3.1 billion, $411.8 million, and $3.5 billion, respectively. Americans were no more eager to pay for the Civil War as they fought it than other generations were for their respective wars. For every six dollars of expenses, they paid off one dollar with existing revenues and borrowed the other five dollars from future generations. As a result, the national debt skyrocketed from $90.6 million in 1861 to $2.7 billion in 1865.
With the war over, Washington rapidly demobilized the army and navy. The army numbered over a million men on May 1, 1865, but fell to 152,000 by New Year’s 1866 and 38,000 by December 1866. The army was split between regiments occupying the South and the West. The defense budget plummeted by nearly three-quarters, from $1.17 billion in 1865 to $343 million in 1866. Meanwhile nondefense spending rose from $161 million to $192 million as the nation’s interests shifted from destroying to reconstructing the South.
While everyone agreed on the vital need for Reconstruction, there were sharp differences over what it meant and how to do it.4 For virtually all northern and most southern whites, the challenge was primarily emotional. Hundreds of thousands of households had to adjust to the terrible loss of loved ones who were either killed or whose bodies or minds were shattered during the war. Reconstruction for countless southerners was quite literal—it meant rebuilding all that the war had destroyed, including not just the ruined houses, barns, warehouses, courthouses, mills, bridges, railroads, factories, and plantations but an entire economy and society. It took the South a decade or so to restore most of what had been physically destroyed and more than a century to catch up economically with the northern states.
Radical Republicans had more in mind for the vanquished South than emancipating slaves and pardoning rebels in return for loyalty oaths.5 Only a sweeping political, economic, and social revolution could justify the loss of 750,000 lives and billions of dollars of wealth. Abolition was merely the first stage toward the realization of American ideals for all Americans. Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts explained that “we must insist upon Equal Rights as the condition of the new order of things.” Representative Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania insisted that “the whole fabric of southern society must be changed. . . . How can republican institutions . . . exist in a mingled community of nabobs and serfs?” Representative George Julian of Indiana contrasted his vision for the South’s future with its sordid past: “Instead of large estates, widely scattered settlements, wasteful agriculture, popular ignorance, social degradation, the decline of manufacturers, contempt for honest labor, and a pampered oligarchy, you want small farms, thrifty tillage, free schools, social independence, flourishing manufactures and the arts, respect for honest labor, and equality of political rights.”6 In other words, Radical Republicans sought to remake the South in the image of the North.
To impose this revolution, the Radicals legally armed themselves with the Constitution, especially Article IV, Section 4: “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican form of Government.” Politically, they enjoyed majorities in both houses of Congress and coordinated their policies and bills through the Joint Committee on Reconstruction. Yet they faced overwhelming economic, political, social, and cultural forces that ultimately either gutted or stunted nearly all their efforts.
Abolition resolved a massive human rights problem that had festered for centuries, but it created two new overwhelming problems: where and how would four million freed slaves live?7 Virtually all were trapped in a vicious cycle of being penniless, landless, and illiterate. If they stayed with their masters they would be little better off than when they were chattel. In effect, they would have simply exchanged slavery for serfdom, while remaining mired in poverty and exploitation. But what was the alternative?
Plenty of land was certainly available. Many slaveholders abandoned their plantations after their slaves either fled or became unmanageable. Other estates went on the auction block because the owners were bankrupt or failed to pay their taxes. Radical Republicans argued that the crisis of black landlessness could be resolved simply by confiscating the property of their former masters and dividing it equally among them. Powerful political forces prevented this from being implemented on a scale large enough even to begin to resolve the problem of black landlessness.
During the war a few enterprising commanders tried various land and wage programs that alleviated conditions in their respective regions. The largest effort was in Louisiana. In 1862 Gen. Benjamin Butler enacted a contract system between former plantation masters and slaves whereby the former guaranteed the latter fixed amounts of wages, food, clothing, and housing in return for fixed work hours. His successor, Gen. Nathaniel Banks, established a uniform rate of three dollars a month or the equal division of 5 percent of the plantation’s earnings for set work hours and the inability of blacks to leave without the owner’s permission. The system peaked with fifty thousand laborers on fifteen hundred plantations.8
Gen. Ulysses Grant initiated a similar program in the region occupied by his troops. In November 1862 he assigned Gen. Lorenzo Thomas to enact this policy. Thomas gave black men in refugee camps a choice among signing up as a soldier, military laborer, or plantation worker. Army privates got ten dollars a month; laborers for the military or private sector earned seven dollars if they were male and five dollars if they were female. President Lincoln was so impressed with the program that, in 1863, he asked Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase to take over and expand it to all Union-occupied rebel territory. Chase briefly considered raising wages and directly administering plantations leased from owners, but a lack of money, skilled administrators, and above all, potential profits killed that plan.
Humanitarians criticized these programs for perpetuating the subjection of blacks rather than liberating them. They argued that true freedom could come only when blacks had their own farms and businesses. A general soon provided them with a working model with which to realize this goal.
Gen. William Sherman met with twenty local black leaders at Savannah on January 12, 1865, and asked them how the government could best help their people. Their primary request was for land of their own. This inspired Sherman’s famous “forty acres and a mule” policy. In the Sea Islands off the Georgia and South Carolina coasts most owners had fled their plantations. In Field Order Number Fifteen, Sherman had those lands confiscated and redistributed to the blacks who lived there. He envisioned each family owning a forty-acre plot in a zone extending from the coast thirty miles inland.
The man Lincoln picked to head the Freedmen’s Bureau could not have been a better choice. Gen. Oliver Otis Howard was a courageous and skilled general who lost an arm at Fair Oaks and eventually rose to command a corps in the Army of the Potomac.10 He was an outstanding administrator and humanitarian. Howard University would be named for him. Under Howard’s leadership, the Freedmen’s Bureau expanded its duties from resettling blacks on land of their own to providing desperately needed food, jobs, skills, schools, health care, and civil rights.
The Freedmen’s Bureau’s greatest short-term success was to avert mass starvation. During the war tens of thousands of slaves escaped from their plantations. As word of the rebel surrender spread, tens of thousands more blacks left their masters to search for freedom. The result was a massive refugee problem whereby countless blacks lived a hand-to-mouth existence in shantytowns on the fringes of cities or army camps. Malnutrition was pervasive but mass starvation loomed with the second refugee wave at the war’s end. In just fifteen months after the war, the bureau handed out thirteen million rations, each of which included enough cornmeal, wheat flour, and sugar to feed one person for a week.11
Education was perhaps the Freedmen’s Bureau’s most notable long-term success. Every southern state except Tennessee outlawed schooling for blacks. Despite this law, some masters taught their slaves or slaves secretly taught themselves. At the time of emancipation nine of ten blacks could not read or write. Efforts by blacks to organize schools were hampered by a lack of qualified teachers and money. By 1869 the bureau had established a system of three thousand lower schools with ten thousand teachers and 150,000 students as well as founded the colleges of Atlanta, Fisk, Hampton, Alcorn, and Tugaloo.12 Booker T. Washington graduated from Hampton College and went on to achieve renown as an educator and scientist.
Education was not just a federal government effort. Liberal church and humanitarian groups also contributed. The most famous was Gideon’s Band, or the Gideonites, composed of young graduates of Harvard, Yale, and other elite universities who devoted a year or so to living in the South and teaching blacks how to read, write, and do sums. They tended to be highly idealistic, with a vision of black people and southern whites shaped by Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Not surprisingly, southern whites feared and hated them and did what they could to drive them away.
The efforts of the Freedmen’s Bureau and liberal groups to promote education were more symbolic than substantive. The pilot schools that they established pointed the way to a better future but usually died after they left. Only state governments had the power to devise and fund school systems that embraced all children and other needy people. During the postwar decades, one southern state after another did erect the bare bones of a system. The trouble, then as now, was the American practice of decentralized education whereby local tax receipts finance local schools. This practice was as disastrous in the South as elsewhere. Schools were segregated by class and race. The wealthier the district, the more likely its schools got first-rate teachers, administrators, buildings, and textbooks, and the poorer the district, the more likely essential elements of education were wanting. Black schools tended to be as poverty-stricken as their surrounding neighborhoods. Thus did public school systems reinforce rather than diminish the South’s racist and feudalistic economic, social, and political hierarchy. By 1880 seven of ten southern blacks remained illiterate.13
The Radical Republicans’ clear vision and political heft were not powerful enough to realize their liberal political and economic revolution. White supremacists in each southern state fought and eventually beat them every step of the way. But until March 4, 1869, their most formidable foe was in the White House.
Andrew Johnson was sworn in as the president of the United States on April 15, 1865, shortly after Abraham Lincoln died. Historians generally rate him among the very worst presidents.14 Solid reasons ground that damning assessment. From virtually his first days in power, he asserted increasingly conservative policies that provoked more Republicans to despise, resist, and finally, impeach him. In short, Andrew Johnson failed utterly at the art of power. General Sherman observed, “He attempts to govern after he has lost the means to govern. He is like a General fighting without an army.”15
What explains Johnson’s transformation from a centrist into an increasingly hardened conservative? Perhaps most important were the demons lurking in his psyche. He was notorious for being stubborn, short-tempered, and intolerant. Although he was a politician, he lacked such fundamental skills as the ability to forge relationships and cut deals. Like Lincoln, he was born into poverty and rose steadily in wealth, status, and power largely by his own efforts. Yet, unlike Lincoln, as Johnson struggled to be a “self-made man,” he was inspired by Andrew Jackson and the Democrats rather than Henry Clay and the Whigs. He lacked Lincoln’s deep intellect and morality. He felt cowed rather than inspired around people of greater learning and erudition in Washington and elsewhere. He bristled at the southern planter elite and later at the northern New England elite who looked down on him as a nouveau riche hillbilly. He especially hated northern liberals, who tended to be far more nimble of mind and tongue than himself. As president he longed to assert control but liberals stole the show.
The result was a vicious circle whereby the more he reacted against Radical Republicans, the more openly they displayed their contempt for him. Symbolically this culminated with a White House visit by Senator Charles Sumner, who hoped to strike a deal. Johnson angrily rejected Sumner’s arguments and showed him to the door. Outside Sumner put on his top hat and discovered that Johnson had used it as a spittoon!16
Johnson was a racist to the very core of his being. He not only held slaves most of his life but believed that ideally the practice should be universal: “I wish to God every head of a family in the United States had one [slave] to take the drudgery and menial service off the family.” Even after he grudgingly accepted abolition’s inevitability during the Civil War, he insisted that “freedom simply meant liberty to work and enjoy the products of their labor and that was all there was of it.” Any notion of equal rights enraged him: “This is a country for white men, and by God, as long as I am President, it shall be a government for white men.” Yet he did support a limited franchise for blacks, a position between liberals who advocated complete and equal suffrage for all males and conservatives who would deny any black the right to vote. He explained his view to William Sharkey, whom he had named Mississippi’s governor: “If you could extend the elective franchise to all persons of color who can read the Constitution . . . and write their names, and . . . who own real estate valued at least two hundred and fifty dollars, and pay taxes therein, you would completely disarm the adversary [liberal Republicans], and set an example the other states will follow.”17
The first clash between Johnson and Republicans was over personnel rather than policy. Determined to pack his administration with loyalists, he initiated sweeping firings and hirings. Yet this attempt to assert and swell his power backfired. The loss of a job converted many a moderate Republican into a liberal determined to resist Johnson by whatever possible means. Johnson’s purge inspired Congress eventually to pass the 1867 Tenure of Office Act that forbade the dismissal of any federal official unless the Senate had approved his successor.
Johnson’s
most controversial acts directly attacked Radical Republican policies. On May 29, 1865, he issued a proclamation promising a blanket amnesty, pardon, and return of all property except slaves to nearly anyone with less than $20,000 of assessed wealth who took an ironclad oath to the United States and its Constitution; those with more than $20,000, along with former federal officers and officials who turned traitor and prominent rebel officers and officials, had to apply for amnesty. In practice, Johnson assured that virtually any applications were rubber stamped. Johnson’s policy of forgiveness was a stunning political and moral flip-flop. After Lincoln’s assassination, he had angrily asserted that “treason must be made odious. . . . Traitors must be punished and impoverished . . . their social power destroyed.”18
In the end, although by definition any U.S. citizen who either fires on the American flag or orders others to do so is a traitor, only three rebel leaders were deprived of their liberty, or in one case his life, for their treason. President Jefferson Davis was imprisoned without trial for two years. Vice President Alexander Stephens served just a few weeks before he was released. Henry Wirz, the notorious commandant of the Andersonville prisoner-of-war camp where thirteen thousand of the forty-five thousand inmates died from disease and starvation, was found guilty of war crimes by a military tribunal and executed. Another fifteen thousand or so southerners with more than $20,000 of assessed wealth were initially deprived of their rights to vote or run for public office, but they swiftly regained these rights after applying to the federal government.
To his credit, Johnson did try to take his arguments to “the people.” In August 1865 he launched a speaking tour of the northern states to justify his policies and ask folks to vote for candidates who upheld his views. Yet if his intent was constructive, his performance was dismal. When a heckler in a Cleveland audience interrupted his speech with the cry, “Hang Jeff Davis,” Johnson replied, “Why not hang Thad Stevens and Wendell Phillips?”19