Johnson abruptly ended the Freedmen Bureau’s land redistribution policy in September 1865 by issuing a directive restoring confiscated lands to former owners who took the ironclad oath. Over forty thousand blacks had actually taken title when Johnson killed the policy and had government officials expel them from their new homes. After liberal Republicans drew up and passed the Freedmen’s Bureau bill that renewed for two years the institution and its policies, Johnson vetoed it on February 19, 1866.
After mustering two-thirds majorities that overrode the veto, Republicans passed the 1866 Southern Homestead Act, which allocated three million acres of public lands in the South for blacks and loyal whites if claims were filed before 1867 and extended landownership to unmarried black women. When Johnson vetoed the bill, Republicans promptly overrode the veto. The good intentions behind this bill collided with the realities of what was actually being given away. Public lands in the South were mostly swamps or tangled forests, hardly fit for viable farms or comfortable lives. Only four thousand black families acquired land under the bill, mostly in Florida. How many of those homesteads survived, let alone flourished, is unknown.
No matter where they lived, nearly all rural blacks remained trapped in poverty’s vicious cycle. Without the low-interest loans available to most whites, they could not buy the land, seed, equipment, draft animals, and other essentials needed to establish a viable farm. Instead they had no choice but to become dependent on loan sharks to borrow money for all their needs at predatory prices. Thus for generations they remained debt-ridden and poverty-stricken peasants rather than becoming middle-class farmers. Sharecropping was pervasive and entrenched across the South for more than a century. Generally the tenant gave away two-thirds of his crop if he borrowed money and merely half if he did not. Yet there was some limited progress. From 1860 to 1900 landownership among blacks rose from less than 1 percent to 20 percent, while illiteracy diminished among blacks from about nine of ten to about one of two.20
Poverty, debt, and malnutrition afflicted not just blacks but many rural whites. The value of the average southern farm plummeted from $22,819 to $2,340 from 1860 to 1870, with much of this loss caused by the elimination of $3 billion worth of slave property. Farm production fell steadily after the war as blacks cut back their work hours. The result was less food at higher costs. In contrast, the bottom fell out of cotton prices, which, before the war, were the road to riches for plantation owners. Supply and demand explains why. When the Civil War erupted, southern cotton accounted for two-thirds of global supply. The rebel leaders tried to capitalize on this dependence. The Confederate president, cabinet, and congress agreed to withhold the 1861 cotton harvest to provoke a British economic crisis, then British intervention on the South’s side. The crisis came, the British did not. Instead Britain and other cotton consumers looked for alternatives. Within a few years, textile factories spun cotton grown in India, Egypt, and elsewhere. After the war, southern cotton planters tried to recapture their former markets. The result was a global cotton glut whereby prices plummeted as growers tried to undercut each other.21
Radical Republicans sought to liberate blacks politically as well as economically. In early 1866 they introduced a civil rights bill that passed the House by 33 to 12 on February 2 and the Senate by 111 to 38 on March 12. This law was a major step toward upholding the liberal democratic ideals upon which America’s independence as a nation and system of government were justified. It defined a citizen as anyone other than an Indian born or naturalized in the United States. It granted to all citizens equal rights for making contracts, bringing lawsuits, and enjoying protection for one’s person and property. Finally, it empowered the federal government to prosecute those who violated any citizen’s rights. Yet there was a glaring omission. Nowhere did the bill mention the right to vote.
Nonetheless, this bill was too radical for conservatives, including President Johnson, who vetoed it on March 27, 1866. He justified doing so by insisting that the bill was unconstitutional, violated “states’ rights,” would make blacks lazy and dependent on the government, and would encourage mingling between the races. The veto at once enraged and inspired liberals. First they overrode the veto with votes of 35 to 19 in the Senate and 126 to 47 in the House. Then they sought to solidify the law with a constitutional amendment.
In contrast to the Thirteenth Amendment’s short and simple language abolishing slavery, the Fourteenth Amendment contained five sections of related rights asserted in ponderous legalese. Section 1 granted citizenship to all people (except Indians) born in the United States or to naturalized immigrants, forbade any state from depriving any citizen of his or her privileges or immunities, and guaranteed equal protection and due process to uphold the life, liberty, and property of any person. Section 2 apportioned congressional seats according to the total of all people (except Indians) in a state and thus eliminated the notorious previous constitutional tenet that counted a slave as three-fifths of a person. A state’s representation in Congress could be reduced if it denied the right to vote to any male twenty-one years of age or older except for unpardoned rebels or criminals. Section 3 denied any federal elected or appointed office to anyone who had previously taken an oath to the United States and violated it as a rebel or given aid and comfort to America’s enemies. It empowered Congress to override this rule by two-thirds votes of both houses. Section 4 guaranteed the payment of America’s national debt but forbade Washington or any state government from servicing the rebel government’s debt. Finally, Section 5 empowered Congress to enforce the amendment with appropriate laws.
While liberal and moderate Republicans agreed on all these tenets, they differed over whether to include voting among the rights of citizenship. The omission proved to be a huge loophole that let racists in the states use various devices to deny suffrage to blacks. Although moderate Republicans insisted on the language that excluded voting in order to entice Democrat votes, not a single Democrat in Congress voted for the amendment. In the end, liberals held their noses and voted for the diluted amendment as a far lesser evil than having no civil rights at all. Thaddeus Stevens explained that reasoning, “Do you inquire why, holding these views . . . I accept so imperfect a proposition? I answer, because I live among men and not among angels.”22
Despite the compromises, the Fourteen Amendment was revolutionary. It overturned the Supreme Court’s 1833 Barrow v. Baltimore ruling that required only Washington and not the states to uphold the Bill of Rights and the 1858 Dred Scott decision that denied citizenship to blacks. For these and other reasons conservatives did all that they could to kill it. They nearly succeeded. Initially ten former rebel states rejected the amendment; only Tennessee voted in favor. For the time being this effectively shelved the Fourteenth Amendment.
Meanwhile President Johnson fought the Radical Republicans on every issue. In 1866 he abolished the military commissions that the Freedmen’s Bureau used to protect black civil rights. This forced blacks to appeal to southern judicial systems dominated by conservatives who either denied them standing or dismissed their cases. Then, in January 1867, he vetoed yet another liberal bill, this one granting blacks the right to vote in the District of Columbia. Liberals overrode this veto and vetoes on two more laws in 1867, the Habeas Corpus Act, which made it easier for citizens to appeal to federal courts, and the Peonage Act, which outlawed forced labor to pay off debts. Johnson was hardly the only critic of those bills; he simply represented the prevailing conservative view. Yet liberals could be just as blistering by arguing that these bills were toothless expressions of principles that would never work in practice unless backed by federal authority.
The conservative obstructionism by Johnson and the former rebel states inspired Radical Republicans to devise a blueprint for the South’s transformation from slavocracy to democracy. They had the power to enact their blueprint, since they emerged from the November 1866 election with veto-proof congressional majorities of 128 to 33 in the House and 61 to 11 in the Sen
ate. Congress passed reconstruction acts on March 6, March 23, and July 19, 1867, with each new one remedying the defects or bolstering the powers of the preceding. The first, known as the Military Reconstruction Act, split the eleven former rebel states among five military districts with each under martial law. A state could revert to equal status within the United States only after fulfilling two requirements. First, it had to write, ratify by a majority of registered voters, and enact a constitution that guaranteed equal protection, due process, and universal manhood suffrage for all white and black men. Second, it had to vote for ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment. The United States deployed twenty thousand troops to help enforce that act. Federal civilian or military officials were empowered to remove any state officials or persecute anyone who denied the civil rights of any citizen. Johnson vetoed each act and Congress overrode each veto. This allowed the Fourteenth Amendment to join the Constitution on July 9, 1868.
Passing progressive laws and constitutional amendments was tough enough. Realizing the letter and spirit of these measures was nearly impossible. For newly liberated blacks, the political marketplace was as alien as the economic marketplace. Yet blacks had enormous potential political power. They outnumbered whites in South Carolina, Mississippi, and Louisiana and made up sizable minorities elsewhere. Regardless of what share of a population they held, it was in black interests everywhere to forge an alliance with whatever liberal or moderate whites could be found.
Across the South progressive whites were either a minority or a nullity. To varying degrees, every southern state was split between low country and up country. Slavery’s viability as an economic and thus political and social system diminished as the land’s altitude and tilt increased and its fertility decreased. Slavery flourished in the flat, rich soils of the tidewater region, less so in the piedmont, and was a curiosity in any state’s mountainous region. The zealotry of secessionists naturally varied with slavery’s prevalence. Across the South, Unionists dominated local politics in northern Alabama and Georgia; western Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina; Arkansas’s Ozarks; and Texas’s Hill Country. Unionists tended to be Republicans and thus natural allies for blacks.23
Three institutions helped prepare blacks for the rights and duties of citizenship. Wherever they existed, black churches became bastions for addressing political problems and developing civic skills among their members. The trouble was that at first there were so few of them. Southern whites had mostly discouraged and often repressed black churches during slavocracy. Churches proliferated after abolition. The army was the best training ground for black leaders. Despite racial double standards for promotion, the army was largely a progressive institution. Military life instilled pride, discipline, and hope for nearly all and a platform for upward economic and political mobility for some. The historian Eric Foner found veterans among “forty-one delegates to state constitutional conventions, sixty-four legislators, three lieutenant governors, and four congressman.”24 Finally, the Freedmen’s Bureau set up Union Leagues of literate blacks, church leaders, and former soldiers. Liberal Republicans and northern black leaders journeyed south and founded radical associations that mobilized southern blacks to assert their political rights, especially equal protection and suffrage.
Blacks increasingly began to organize themselves politically. As early as 1862, a group in New Orleans founded the newspaper L’Union with first a French, then a bilingual edition that addressed the array of problems facing free and still-enslaved blacks. L’Union’s success inspired another group to begin publishing the Tribune in 1864. Under Jean Houzeau’s expert editing, the Tribune became renowned not just for championing humanitarian causes but also for its literary style. Houzeau and a group of other black leaders founded the Equal Rights League to fight discrimination against blacks in suffrage and streetcars. In May 1864 a group in Beaufort, South Carolina, elected and sent sixteen delegates to the Republican Party convention. The first recorded elections in which blacks voted in the South occurred at Mitchelville, on one of South Carolina’s Sea Islands, and Amelia Island, Florida, in 1865.
The result across the South was token political progress. A two-party system between conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans briefly flared in the southern states during Reconstruction, then died as white supremacists retook power. In all, 2 blacks, both from Mississippi, served in the U.S. Senate and 15 blacks won seats in the House of Representatives, while 633 blacks served as state legislators. Most southern whites did everything possible to stunt black political power, and they largely succeeded. Black voting turnouts peaked in the 1872 election. The number of black federal or state elected or appointed officials nosedived after 1876, when the last federal troops and officials were withdrawn.25
Liberal Republicans could thwart President Johnson’s obstructionism in only two ways—they could override and impeach. They mustered enough votes to enact bills over most of his vetoes. Meanwhile they searched for an excuse to impeach him. In the impeachment process, the House of Representatives acts like a grand jury and the Senate like a jury. Johnson’s enemies first tried with a vote on December 5, 1867, but the list of impeachment charges was so flimsy that only 57 congressmen supported it while 108 voted against it. Then, a few months later, Johnson gave his enemies the excuse to rally a majority against him.26
Johnson’s character clearly harbored an aggressive and self-destructive dimension. He loved to goad his ever-lengthening list of enemies despite, or more likely because of, their power to retaliate. He knew that his enemies would pounce after he dismissed Secretary of War Edwin Stanton on February 21, 1868, but he defiantly did so anyway. In firing Stanton, he at once got rid of a hated cabinet member and challenged a hated law. Eleven months earlier, in March 1867, he had vetoed on constitutional grounds the Tenure of Office Act that forbade a president from firing a federal appointee until the Senate confirmed his successor. Congress overrode his veto. When the House of Representative voted 128 to 47 for eleven articles of impeachment against Johnson on February 24, 1868, nine were related to his firing of Stanton. The charges then went to the Senate for the actual trial. He was acquitted in three separate votes in which each resulted in thirty-five senators voting for and nineteen against conviction, one shy of the required two-thirds majority. The first vote was on May 16 and the second and third votes on May 19, 1868.
Johnson was not humbled by the impeachment charges or by winning acquittal by only one vote. He continued to speak out angrily against the Radical Republican agenda and on December 25, 1868, gave the former rebel leaders the Christmas gift of their lives when he granted them unconditional amnesty. Each was now free to resume all the rights of citizenship.
Four days after the Senate acquitted the president by a single vote, the Republican Party convention opened in Chicago on May 20. The next day the delegates unanimously acclaimed Ulysses Grant their presidential nominee. Upon accepting the nomination, Grant endorsed the party’s platform and ended his speech by simply declaring, “Let us have peace.”27
The Democrats took a lot longer to forge a consensus behind a candidate. It was not until the twenty-first ballot that two-thirds of the delegates endorsed for president Horatio Seymour, then New York’s governor and formerly New York City’s mayor during the draft riots that he was partly responsible for provoking.
Grant crushed Seymour by winning 214 to 80 electoral votes, twenty-six to eight states, and 52 percent of the popular vote. He had never before held elected office and was the youngest man yet to be elected president. This was either irrelevant or advantageous in his supporters’ minds. After all, Grant was the general whose strategy had ultimately destroyed the Confederacy. They hoped that he would bring the same relentless vigor to restoring the nation.
14
Night Riders and Black Codes
There will be some black men who remember that, with silent tongue and clenched teeth and steady eye and poised bayonet, they have helped mankind on to this great consummation whi
le, I fear, there will be some white ones unable to forget that with malignant heart and deceitful speech, they have strove to hinder it.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
Slavery is dead. The negro is not, there is the misfortune.
CINCINNATI ENQUIRER
The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun, then moved back again toward slavery.
W. E. B. DUBOIS
Bitter animosities disrupted the protocol of Ulysses Grant’s presidential inauguration. En route to the Capitol, Grant’s carriage stopped briefly before the White House. Johnson sent word that he was too busy to attend the ceremony. This actually relieved Grant, who loathed Johnson. Yet the incident gave his administration a sour start. In his address, Grant reassured Americans that “I shall on all subjects have a policy to recommend, but none to enforce against the will of the people.”1
The polices that Grant recommended over the next eight years were shaped by diametrically opposed ideologies. Conservatives cheered Grant’s policies that bolstered the power of the corporate business world. Yet ethically Grant was a genuine liberal. He promoted civil rights for blacks, a just peace for Indians, free public secular education for all children, the strict separation of church and state, and the taxing of church property. He boldly called on the American people to uphold their nation’s ideals of “free thought, free speech, a free press, pure morals unfettered by religious sentiments, and of equal rights and privileges to all men, irrespective of nationality, color, or religion.”2 In 1871 he established the Civil Service Commission to transform federal officials from creatures of political patronage into professionals.
The Age of Lincoln and the Art of American Power, 1848-1876 Page 28
