The Soul of America

by Jon Meacham

  A Confederate general, Jubal A. Early, a veteran of Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, also heavily influenced the white Southern understanding of the war and of the Lost Cause. As the president of, and a longtime leading voice within, the Southern Historical Society, Early strove mightily to burnish the story of the war and its legacy, paying particular attention to the cultivation of the image of Robert E. Lee. By casting Lee as a model of virtue who only reluctantly took up arms to defend his beloved Virginia and who sought reconciliation after the war, Early and his compatriots gave the Lost Cause narrative the greatest of heroes. When Lee died, in 1870, the praise was more than Frederick Douglass could bear. “We can scarcely take up a newspaper that is not filled with nauseating flatteries of the late Robert E. Lee,” Douglass wrote. “It would seem from this that the soldier who kills the most men in battle, even in a bad cause, is the greatest Christian, and entitled to the highest place in heaven.”

  An article of faith in the Lost Cause creed was that the North had not outfought or out-generaled the South. Victory had come to the Union, and defeat to the Confederacy, rather, because of the North’s overwhelming advantages in manpower and industrial strength. By explaining away defeat as the result largely of brute force, the Lost Cause was comforting and utilitarian, for it gave Southerners a way both to think about the past and to act in the present. They had resisted Northern force in battle; now they would defy Northern authority in peace, fighting Pollard’s “ ‘war of ideas.’ ” Before Fort Sumter they had feared restrictions on slavery and had resorted to force of arms. After Appomattox they feared the imposition of the national consensus and would deploy political and paramilitary means to protect their way of life.

  Old times there would not be forgotten. “The ‘Lost Cause,’ ” Pollard wrote in 1868, “needs no war to regain it. We have taken up new hopes, new arms, new methods.”

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  Vigilante violence was one such method. In the spring of 1866 in Pulaski, Tennessee, six former Confederates gathered in Thomas M. Jones’s law office in a brick building in Giles County. They were bored, they recalled, and struck on the idea of founding a new organization. To be known as the Ku Klux Klan, the group’s name was derived from kuklos, the Greek word for circle or band, and featured elaborate titles, costumes and hoods fashioned from bed linens, horseback rides through the night—and, soon enough, terror attacks against African Americans.

  Southern accounts of the Klan’s founding are sentimental. “Boys, let’s start something to break the monotony and cheer up our mothers and girls,” one of the organizers is alleged to have said. “Let’s start a club of some kind.” This version of the story, reported in Claude G. Bowers’s 1929 book The Tragic Era: The Revolution After Lincoln, is blithely racist. When the white-sheeted Klansmen rode, Bowers wrote, “every one was merry for the moment—every one but the freedmen, who, being superstitious, thought they had seen ghosts from the near-by battlefields. Many of these, who had been idling, hurried back contritely and subdued to their old masters’ fields. At first the whites laughed over the fears of the blacks, and then, noting an improvement among them, with more industry and less petty pilfering, the serious possibilities of the society were envisaged.”

  Not only envisaged, but acted upon. Spreading through the South, the Klan’s night riders terrorized freed African Americans, many of whom were voting and holding office in the aftermath of the war, and the Klansmen undermined Reconstruction authorities—what the Southern writer and Nathan Bedford Forrest biographer Andrew Lytle called, without irony, “the Scalawag-Carpetbagger regime.”

  By the spring of 1867, at a gathering at the Maxwell House hotel in Nashville, the Klan was reorganized with a new “Prescript,” a detailed hierarchical charter. Intrigued by what he was hearing about the Klan, Nathan Bedford Forrest, the former Confederate cavalry commander, came to Nashville, looked up an old officer of his, asked about joining, and was almost immediately elected “Grand Wizard of the Invisible Empire.” Forrest was a legendary figure. “There will never be peace in Tennessee,” Union general William T. Sherman had said during the war, “until Forrest is dead.” And there was not peace—not really—even now.

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  The effectiveness of the presidency in the years after the war was underwhelming. Andrew Johnson, the Tennessee Democrat whom Lincoln had chosen as his vice presidential running mate to broaden the GOP’s appeal during the 1864 election, proved untrue to Republican orthodoxy. There were, to be sure, landmark advances in the wake of Lincoln’s assassination, but they largely came about in spite of Johnson, not because of him.

  Therein lies a lesson: If sufficiently developed and organized, public sentiment, as manifested in Congress, can prevail over presidential intransigence. Lincoln offered a case study in the leadership of hope and progress; Andrew Johnson’s is an unhappier story of willfulness and single-minded service to a favored constituency—in this case, to white Southerners.

  Even the most obtuse chief executive, though, can be formidable without being indomitable. The Civil Rights Act of 1866 and Reconstruction legislation in 1867 that created military districts in the South and guaranteed black male suffrage were passed over Johnson’s veto. The president also unsuccessfully opposed the Fourteenth Amendment, which granted citizenship to former slaves and guaranteed, at least on paper, equal protection. The amendment established the principle of birthright citizenship (thus overturning Dred Scott and making blacks citizens), and, with its equal protection clause, put the idea of equality into the Constitution for the first time, making the federal government, not the states, the protector of Americans’ liberties.

  There had been early hopes for Lincoln’s successor. “Johnson, we have faith in you,” Radical Republican senator Benjamin F. Wade told the new president. “By the Gods, there will be no trouble now in running the government.” At first Johnson had seemed determined to punish the rebels. “I hold this: …treason is a crime, and crime must be punished,” he said. Charles Sumner himself believed Johnson an ally. The new president, Sumner remarked, was “the sincere friend of the negro and ready to act for him decisively.”

  Sumner and his Radical Republican compatriots were, alas, wrong. The president from Tennessee sometimes said the right things, but in the end his view of Reconstruction favored a fast resolution of the outstanding issues with the conquered states—and the rights of black freedmen did not lend themselves to quick adjudication. “White men alone must manage the South,” Johnson remarked in 1865. Two years later, in 1867, the president asserted that blacks were incapable of self-government. “No independent government of any form has ever been successful in their hands,” Johnson wrote in his annual message. “On the contrary, wherever they have been left to their own devices they have shown a constant tendency to relapse into barbarism.” It was, the historian Eric Foner observed, “probably the most blatantly racist pronouncement ever to appear in an official state paper of an American president.”

  Before his first year in office was out, Johnson had done much to return the Southern states to an antebellum footing. He had vetoed the 1866 civil rights bill and the Freedmen’s Bureau bill, infuriating Radical Republicans; his civil rights veto message argued that “the distinction of race and color is by the bill made to operate in favor of the colored and against the white race.” The presidency which under Lincoln had been a tool of transformation had become, under Johnson, a refuge from modernity.

  Johnson was ultimately impeached but not removed from office—he escaped conviction in the Senate by one vote—by Radical Republicans who believed him to be hopelessly accommodating toward his native South. As he lost ground on Reconstruction, Johnson grew erratic, lashing out at opponents. He had, in fact, never seemed entirely stable: Johnson had had too much fortifying whiskey before delivering, or trying to deliver, his inaugural remarks on becoming vice president in 1865. “It must
be said,” the journalist Noah Brooks reported to his readers, “that upon that momentous and solemn occasion, where were assembled the good, the brave, the beautiful, the noble of our land, and the representatives of many foreign lands, Andrew Johnson, called to be Vice President of the United States, was in a state of manifest intoxication.” Johnson rambled in remarks that were emotional, florid, and overlong; he “repeated inaudibly” the oath of office, superfluously adding in “I can say that with perfect propriety” at various points; and, once the oath was done, he started up again, aimlessly discoursing on the import of the occasion. (Defenders say he was fighting illness; sick or no, what people noticed was that he was drunk.)

  On Washington’s Birthday—Thursday, February 22, 1866—Johnson delivered an angry, self-pitying speech in the capital. “Who, I ask, has suffered more for the Union than I have?” Johnson said. (Lincoln, for one, comes to mind.) He attacked Radical Republicans, including Thaddeus Stevens, Charles Sumner, and Wendell Phillips, and asserted that federal steps toward equality amounted to a dangerous centralization of power—an argument in sync with Edward Pollard’s.

  Resentful and impassioned, Johnson also riled up the Washington’s Birthday crowd with claims that his opponents were considering having him assassinated. Rather than offering reassurance to an anxious public, then, Johnson chose to foment chaos and promulgate fears of conspiracy. “If my blood is to be shed because I vindicate the Union and the preservation of this Government in its original purity and character,” he said, “let it be shed; let an altar to the Union be erected, and then, if it is necessary, take me and lay me upon it, and the blood that now warms and animates my existence shall be poured out as a fit libation to the Union of these States.”

  In the spring of 1871, President Grant went to Capitol Hill to seek legislative authority to take federal action to put down the Ku Klux Klan, personally writing out his call for laws to “secure life, liberty, and property.”

  In the presidential contest of 1868, U. S. Grant won the White House as the nominee of the Republican Party, but he faced a complicated racial calculus. Northern opinion was divided between those who wished to force the white South to accept political equality for the freedmen and others who, sharing prevalent racial views of the time, were less interested in elevating blacks to the status of whites. The Union general Thomas Ewing, Jr., a native of Ohio who served as the first chief justice of Kansas, articulated white fears about Reconstruction during the 1868 presidential campaign. He wanted to support Grant, he said, but worried about a rush to equality. “Blood is thicker than water,” Ewing said, “and Northern whites will sympathize with Southern whites in their struggle to shake off the incubus of Negro rule.”

  As president from 1869 to 1877, Grant struggled to govern a majority-white nation along unionist principles in a racially backward age. Many Northern whites were largely uninterested in, if not outright hostile to, measures to bring equality to the races. And the South was the most confounding theater of the new war. “There has never been a moment since Lee surrendered,” Grant said, “that I would not have gone more than halfway to meet the Southern people in a spirit of conciliation. But they have never responded to it. They have not forgotten the war.”

  The amendment extending voting rights to black men, President Grant wrote, was a “measure of grander importance than any other one act of the kind from the foundation of our free Government to the present day.”

  Nor would they. “The principle for which we contended is bound to reassert itself,” Jefferson Davis remarked after the Confederacy’s fall, “though it may be at another time and in another form.” Defeated on the battlefield, many Southerners, following Pollard, were determined to win the peace—and victory in the long shadow of Appomattox would be defined by the extent to which the old Confederacy could subjugate blacks.

  Yet Grant, in contrast to Andrew Johnson, appreciated the bigness of his office and of the times. On Wednesday, March 30, 1870, to commemorate the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, with its constitutional extension of voting rights to African American men, Grant sent a special message to Congress. The amendment, he wrote, was “a measure of grander importance than any other one act of the kind from the foundation of our free Government to the present day.” He took a broad view of the moment and its implications. “To the race more favored heretofore by our laws I would say, Withhold no legal privilege of advancement to the new citizen.” Grant closed by affirming the significance of the hour. “I repeat,” he wrote, “that the adoption of the fifteenth amendment to the Constitution completes the greatest civil change and constitutes the most important event that has occurred since the nation came into life.”

  The amendment’s ratification led to the passage of the Enforcement Act in May of that year—a law that empowered federal authorities to crack down on the Ku Klux Klan. (It was the first of three such measures.) Still, the violence and the terror continued. Force had to be met with force. Senator John Sherman of Ohio, younger brother of General William T. Sherman, articulated a fairly common Northern view: “If that is the only alternative,” Sherman wrote, “I am willing to…again appeal to the power of the nation to crush, as we once before have done, this organized civil war.”

  At last, in the spring of 1871, President Grant intervened on Capitol Hill. He needed, he said, extraordinary powers to bring order to the chaos in the South. Writing in his own hand, he made the case for action. “A condition of affairs now exists in some of the States of the Union rendering life and property insecure and the carrying of the mails and the collection of the revenue dangerous.” His conclusion: “Therefore I urgently recommend such legislation as in the judgment of Congress shall effectually secure life, liberty, and property, and the enforcement of law in all parts of the United States.”

  Congress agreed, and Grant was given the authority to suspend habeas corpus and to deploy military force to fight the Klan. The target of the bill: those who “conspire together, or go in disguise upon the public highway, or upon the premises of another for the purpose…of depriving any person or any class of persons of the equal protection of the laws.”

  The armies of the Lost Cause rallied against Grant and Congress. To the Mississippi Clarion, the law was “unconstitutional and hideously despotic.” Congressman James M. Leach of North Carolina called it “an outrage upon the Constitution, an outrage upon liberty and free government, an outrage upon the good name of a noble State and a law-loving people.”

  The Grant-era maneuvers against the reign of terror in the South—which included prosecutions—had the desired effect, and the Klan dissipated as an active force. It was a moment of hope in the postbellum world, but it was a brief one. “Though rejoiced at the suppression of KuKluxery even in one neighborhood,” Grant attorney general Amos T. Akerman wrote, “I feel greatly saddened by this business. It has revealed a perversion of moral sentiment among the Southern whites which bodes ill to that part of the country for this generation.”

  An economic depression, a series of racially reactionary Supreme Court decisions, and the withdrawal of federal forces from the Louisiana and South Carolina statehouses after the disputed 1876 presidential election—the price of Republican Rutherford B. Hayes’s defeat of Democrat Samuel Tilden—essentially brought Reconstruction to a conclusion.

  Fearing a Democratic victory, Hayes had written that a President Tilden would sacrifice the work of Lincoln and Grant. “I don’t care for myself,” Hayes said before the final outcome was known, “and the party, yes, and the country, too, can stand it; but I do care for the poor colored men of the South….The result [of a Democratic presidency] will be that the Southern people will practically treat the constitutional amendments as nullities, and then the colored man’s fate will be worse than when he was in slavery.”

  Yet it would be a President Hayes, not a President Tilden, who, in exchange for Southern support, would le
ave “the poor colored men of the South” without protection in hostile territory. “As to Southern affairs,” Hayes wrote a friend from Texas, “ ‘the let alone policy’ seems now to be the true course.” As for himself, Hayes said, he had “nothing but good will” for the South.

  The post-1877 period was bleak. “The whole South—every state in the South—had got into the hands of the very men who held us as slaves,” said a former slave. And violence, though more sporadic than in the Klan’s heyday, remained a fact of life. The same year Hayes campaigned against Tilden, future South Carolina senator Ben Tillman was part of an attack on African American Republicans at Hamburg, South Carolina. “The purpose of our visit to Hamburg was to strike terror,” Tillman recalled. “And the next morning when the Negroes who had fled to the swamp returned to the town, the ghastly sight…of seven dead Negroes lying stark and stiff certainly had its effect.”

  And so things would stand for years to come. “If,” W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in 1935, “the Reconstruction of the Southern states, from slavery to free labor, and from aristocracy to industrial democracy, had been conceived as a major national program of America, whose accomplishment at any price was well worth the effort, we should be living today in a different world.” But there had no such conception, or at least no such plausible conception given the political, cultural, and economic realities of the nation.

  By the 1890s and into the first years of the twentieth century, Jim Crow laws were prevalent in the South, and black voters were systematically disenfranchised. The North, meanwhile, had its own pattern of de jure and de facto segregation. In 1894, Mississippi voted to include the Confederate battle emblem on its state flag. Two years later, in Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court sanctioned the racist principle of “separate but equal.”