The Soul of America

by Jon Meacham

  “BUT FOR YOUR RACE” Ibid.

  “WHEN WAS IT EVER” Woodward, Burden of Southern History, 90.

  HIS LAST PUBLIC SPEECH Louis P. Masur, Lincoln’s Last Speech: Wartime Reconstruction and the Crisis of Reunion (New York, 2013).

  “WE MEET THIS EVENING” Ibid., 5.

  DESCRIBED AS “MISTY” Noah Brooks, Lincoln Observed: Civil War Dispatches of Noah Brooks, ed. Michael Burlingame (Baltimore, 1998), 183.

  “CHEERS UPON CHEERS” Ibid.

  AS TAD LINCOLN PICKED UP Masur, Lincoln’s Last Speech, 162.

  HAD GIVEN THE UNION “HOPE” Ibid., 189.

  “WE SIMPLY MUST BEGIN” Ibid. “The speech was longer and of a different character from what most people had expected,” Noah Brooks wrote, “but it was well received, and it showed that the President had shared in, and had considered, the same anxieties which the people have had, as this struggle has drawn to a close.” Brooks, Lincoln Observed, 183–84.

  EDWARD ALFRED POLLARD Pollard, Lost Cause: A New Southern History and The Lost Cause Regained (New York, 1868); Jack P. Maddex, Jr., The Reconstruction of Edward A. Pollard: A Rebel’s Conversion to Postbellum Unionism (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1974); “Edward A. Pollard” in The American Annual Cyclopedia and Register of Important Events, 1872 (New York, 1872), 676; James Southall Wilson, “Edward Alfred Pollard,” in Library of Southern Literature, Compiled Under the Direct Supervision of Southern Men of Letters, ed. Edwin A. Alderman, Joel C. Harris, and Charles W. Kent (Atlanta, 1907), 9:4147–50; Joseph G. de Roulhac Hamilton, “Edward A. Pollard,” in Dictionary of American Biography, ed. Allen Johnson and Dumas Malone (New York, 1928–37), 47–48; Connelly and Bellows, God and General Longstreet, 1–38; Brooks D. Simpson, “Continuous Hammering and Mere Attrition: Lost Cause Critics and the Military Reputation of Ulysses S. Grant” in Myth of the Lost Cause, 147–69; Peter S. Carmichael, “New South Visionaries: Virginia’s Last Generation of Slaveholders, the Gospel of Progress, and the Lost Cause,” ibid., 119–26; James M. McPherson, “American Victory, American Defeat” in Why the Confederacy Lost, ed. Gabor S. Boritt (New York, 1992), 17–42.

  “NO ONE CAN READ ARIGHT” Pollard, Lost Cause: A New Southern History, 46. In a January 1856 speech at the Tremont Temple in Boston—approvingly cited by Pollard—Georgia senator Robert Toombs had declared: “The white is the superior race, and the black the inferior; and subordination, with or without law, will be the status of the African in this mixed society; and, therefore, it is the interest of both, and especially of the black race, and of the whole society, that this status should be fixed, controlled, and protected by law.” Ibid., 49. To Pollard, “The whole ground is covered by these two propositions: that subordination is the necessary condition of the black man; and that the so-called ‘slavery’ in the South was but the precise adjustment of this subordination by law.” Ibid.

  “THE PEOPLE OF THE SOUTH” Ibid., 750.

  A “ ‘WAR OF IDEAS’ ” Ibid. See also Blight, Race and Reunion, 50–51.

  “THE WAR HAS LEFT” Pollard, Lost Cause: A New Southern History, 751. Pollard added: “It would be immeasurably the worst consequence of defeat in this war that the South should lose its moral and intellectual distinctiveness as a people, and cease to assert its well-known superiority in civilization, in political scholarship, and in all the standards of individual character over the people of the North.” Ibid.

  “DID NOT DECIDE” Ibid., 752.

  HE WAS “PROFOUNDLY CONVINCED” Pollard, Lost Cause Regained, 13.

  THE “TRUE CAUSE” Ibid., 14. It was, Pollard wrote, “the greater contest.” Ibid., 154–55.

  “MUST WEAR THE CROWN” Ibid., 156. See also Wilson, Baptized in Blood, for the religious elements of the Lost Cause.

  JUBAL A. EARLY, A VETERAN For Early and his role in shaping the images of Lee and of the Lost Cause, see, for instance, Charles C. Osborne, Jubal: The Life and Times of General Jubal A. Early, CSA, Defender of the Lost Cause (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1992), 431–35, 438–40; Connelly, Marble Man, 55, 73–78; Blight, Race and Reunion, 264–70; Connelly and Bellows, God and General Longstreet, 3, 26, 33–35.

  “WE CAN SCARCELY” Alice Fahs and Joan Waugh, eds., The Memory of the Civil War in American Culture (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2004), 57.

  THE NORTH HAD NOT OUTFOUGHT See, for instance, Boritt, Why the Confederacy Lost, particularly McPherson, “American Victory, American Defeat,” ibid., 17–42; Connelly and Bellows, God and General Longstreet, 1–38; Blight, Race and Reunion, 255–99. David Herbert Donald, ed., Why the North Won the Civil War: Six Authoritative Views on the Economic, Military, Diplomatic, Social, and Political Reasons Behind the Confederacy’s Defeat (New York, 2005), is also instructive. Boritt’s collection, as Boritt put it, “follows in the footsteps” of the Donald book. Boritt, Why the Confederacy Lost, 13.

  Henry A. Wise, the former Virginia governor and Confederate general, articulated this view in a speech on behalf of the Female Orphan Society in Richmond in the last days of January 1866, saying:

  The noblest hands of men who ever fought or who ever fell in the annals of war, whose glorious deeds history ever took pen to record were, I exultingly claim, the private soldiers in the armies of the great Confederate cause. Whether right or wrong in the cause which they espoused, they were earnest and honest patriots in their convictions, who thought that they were right to defend their own, their native land, its soil, its altars and its honor….They fought with a devout confidence and courage which was unconquerable save by starvation, blockade, overwhelming numbers, foreign dupes and mercenaries, Yankeedom, Negrodom and death! Richmond Enquirer, January 31, 1866.

  In an address at Hanover, Virginia, in the summer of 1867, Wise said that the white South was not to be subjugated to blacks. “Are her lands and temples and groves to be dedicated to the Congo race?” Wise asked. Blacks were “naturally lazy and unsteady at work, and they are likely to be the slaves of crimes, engendered by their idleness, dissipation, destitution, and consequent degradation. They are unfit for self-government, and need training as mere pupils of liberty….The white race everywhere cannot but heed our call to the rescue of our race. Let the appeal be at once made with a loud and long note, as of a trumpet making no uncertain sound.” NYT, August 25, 1867.

  In a discursive letter to a New York publishing house that was preparing a biographical sketch of him that he disliked, Wise wrote: “I said all I meant, meant all I said, and tried my best to do all I said and meant for ‘the lost cause.’ What is the ‘lost cause’?” The Confederacy, he said, “is not the only cause lost. The Constitution is lost; the Union, defined by it, is lost; the liberty of States and their people, which they both at first and for half a century guarded, are lost. I am anxious only that the truth shall be told and felt.” Undated clip, Wise Family Papers, Virginia Historical Society.

  The image of Robert E. Lee, as noted above in the discussion of Jubal Early, was an essential element in the Lost Cause. In a sense, as the decades passed, Lee became the Confederacy, far more so than his commander in chief, Jefferson Davis, or his brilliant colleague Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson. This was useful for adherents of the Lost Cause, for Lee would come to be seen in many quarters as a worthy American, rather than as a merely Southern, icon. For an examination of this subject, see Connelly, Marble Man, which traces Lee’s evolving image from “Lee in His Time,” Ibid., 11–26, through “The Making of a Southern Idol,” Ibid., 62–98, to the “Birth of a National Hero,” Ibid., 99–122, to “Lee and the Southern Renaissance, 1920–1940,” Ibid., 123–40, to “The Middle-Class Hero: From Freeman to the Centennial,” Ibid., 141–62.

  To Theodore Roosevelt—whose mother grew up in antebellum Georgia and whose uncles fought for the Confederacy—Lee was “a matter of pride to all his countrymen.” Connelly and Bellows, God and General Longstreet, 75. In 1904, when Robert E. Lee, Jr., published a p
opular volume entitled Recollections and Letters of Robert E. Lee, The New York Times was struck by the late general’s “true character…the modesty, the courage, the humility and the grandeur of soul.” Ibid.

  In testimony before the Joint Committee on Reconstruction in Congress in Washington on Saturday, February 17, 1866, Lee was circumspect, answering lawmakers’ questions laconically and briefly. Asked whether former Confederates might make common cause with England, France, or another foreign power in the event of war with the United States, Lee allowed: “It is possible. It depends upon the feelings of the individual.” Of black suffrage, he said: “My own opinion is that, at this time, they cannot vote intelligently, and that giving them the right of suffrage would open the door to a great deal of demagogism, and lead to embarrassments in various ways.”

  Would a Virginia jury convict someone—the committee tactfully cited Davis as an example, not Lee himself—of treason for rebelling against the Union? “I think it is very probable that they would not consider that he had committed treason,” Lee said.

  “In what light would they view it?” Senator Jacob M. Howard of Michigan asked. “What would be their excuse or justification?”

  “So far as I know, they look upon the action of the State, in withdrawing itself from the government of the United States, as carrying the individuals of the State along with it; that the State was responsible for the act, not the individual….The act of Virginia, in withdrawing herself from the United States, carried me along as a citizen of Virginia, and that her law and her acts were binding on me.”

  “And that you felt to be your justification in taking the course you did?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Lee. Report of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, at the First Session, Thirty-Ninth Congress (Washington, D.C., 1866), 131–34.

  OLD TIMES THERE Blight, Race and Reunion, 259, quotes Jefferson Davis on the point: “We may not hope to see the rebuilding of the temple as our Fathers designed it, but we can live on praying for that event and die with eyes fixed on the promised land.” Ibid.

  “THE ‘LOST CAUSE’ ” Pollard, Lost Cause Regained, 214.

  IN THE SPRING OF 1866 Elaine Frantz Parsons, Ku-Klux: The Birth of the Klan During Reconstruction (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2015), 27–71; Blight, Race and Reunion, 108–22; Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York, 2014), 425–44; Allen W. Trelease, White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction (Baton Rouge, 1971), 3–27; David M. Chalmers, Hooded Americanism: The History of the Ku Klux Klan (New York, 1987), 8–21; Claude G. Bowers, The Tragic Era: The Revolution After Lincoln (New York, 1929), 306–12; Andrew Nelson Lytle, Bedford Forrest and His Critter Company (New York, 1931), 382–85.

  On Reconstruction in general, see Foner, Reconstruction, and his Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction (New York, 2005); Douglas R. Egerton, The Wars of Reconstruction: The Brief, Violent History of America’s Most Progressive Era (New York, 2014); White, Republic for Which It Stands; Blight, Race and Reunion, especially 98–139; George C. Rable, But There Was No Peace: The Role of Violence in the Politics of Reconstruction (Athens, Ga., 1984); Gregory Downs, After Appomattox: Military Occupation and the Ends of War (Cambridge, Mass., 2015).

  THEY WERE BORED Bowers, Tragic Era, 306.

  DERIVED FROM kuklos Ibid.

  “BOYS, LET’S START SOMETHING” Ibid.

  “EVERY ONE WAS” Ibid., 306-07.

  “THE SCALAWAG-CARPETBAGGER REGIME” Lytle, Bedford Forrest, 382. The Unionist governor of Tennessee, William G. Brownlow, was furious about the vigilante violence. “I have no concessions to make to traitors, no compromises to offer to assassins and robbers; and if, in the sweep of coming events, retributive justice shall overtake the lawless and violent, their own temerity will have called it forth,” Brownlow announced on Monday, February 25, 1867. “The outrages enumerated must and SHALL cease.” Trelease, White Terror, 12.

  AT A GATHERING AT THE MAXWELL HOUSE HOTEL Trelease, White Terror, 14–16.

  INTRIGUED BY WHAT HE WAS HEARING Lytle, Bedford Forrest, 382–83.

  “THERE WILL NEVER BE” Ibid., 305. The Klan and related groups waged a campaign of violence against blacks and federal officials, terrorizing those whom unrepentant Confederates believed to be threats. The Union general Carl Schurz, in his 1865 Report on Conditions in the South, wrote: “The pecuniary value which the individual negro formerly represented having disappeared, the maiming and killing of colored men seems to be looked upon by many as one of those venial offenses which must be forgiven to the outraged feelings of a wronged and robbed people.” Trelease, White Terror, xvi–xvii.

  The chaos and bloodshed were so widespread that Congress launched an investigation through a panel officially known as the Joint Select Committee to Inquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States. Ibid., 392.

  In 1872, the final majority report of the joint committee on the Klan struck reasonable notes. “The strong feeling which led to rebellion and sustained brave men, however mistaken, in resisting the Government which demanded their submission to its authority, the sincerity of whose belief was attested by their enormous sacrifice of life and treasure—this feeling cannot be expected to subside at once, nor in years,” the Republicans wrote. “But while we invoke this forbearance and conciliation, fully recognizing that far from the largest part of the southern people a reluctant obedience is all that is to be hoped for, let it be understood that less than obedience the Government cannot accept.” Ibid., 397. The “remnants of rebellious feeling, the antagonisms of race, or the bitterness of political partisanships” should not, the Republican majority wrote, “degrade the soldiers of Lee…into the cowardly midnight prowlers and assassins who scourge and kill the poor and defenseless.” Ibid., 397–98.

  ANDREW JOHNSON, THE TENNESSEE DEMOCRAT Annette Gordon-Reed, Andrew Johnson (New York, 2011); Hans L. Trefousse, Andrew Johnson: A Biography (New York, 1989); Albert Castel, The Presidency of Andrew Johnson (Lawrence, Kan., 1979).

  THE CIVIL RIGHTS ACT OF 1866 Foner, Reconstruction, 245–51.

  RECONSTRUCTION LEGISLATION IN 1867 Ibid., 276–77.

  THE PRESIDENT ALSO UNSUCCESSFULLY OPPOSED Ibid., 260–61. See also White, Republic for Which It Stands, 73–75.

  “JOHNSON, WE HAVE FAITH” Foner, Reconstruction, 177.

  “I HOLD THIS” Ibid.

  “THE SINCERE FRIEND” Ibid., 178.

  HIS VIEW OF RECONSTRUCTION Ibid., 176–227. See also White, Republic for Which It Stands, 37–42; and Gordon-Reed, Andrew Johnson, 122–25.

  “WHITE MEN ALONE” Foner, Reconstruction, 180.

  “NO INDEPENDENT GOVERNMENT” Ibid.

  “PROBABLY THE MOST BLATANTLY RACIST” Ibid.

  AN ANTEBELLUM FOOTING Ibid., 189. “Every political right which the State possessed under the Federal Constitution [before the war] is hers today,” said Alabama governor Lewis E. Parsons, “with the single exception relating to slavery.” Ibid.

  HE HAD VETOED THE Ibid., 239–51.

  “THE DISTINCTION OF RACE” Ibid., 250.

  JOHNSON WAS ULTIMATELY IMPEACHED Gordon-Reed, Andrew Johnson, 130–39; White, Republic for Which It Stands, 91–94. See also Hans L. Trefousse, Impeachment of a President: Andrew Johnson, the Blacks, and Reconstruction (New York, 1999).

  LASHING OUT AT OPPONENTS Foner, Reconstruction, 249, and Forever Free, 116–17.

  TOO MUCH FORTIFYING WHISKEY Gordon-Reed, Andrew Johnson, 82–87. For a contemporary account, see Brooks, Lincoln Observed, 166–67. “I write these words in humiliation of spirit,” Brooks noted, “for what honest American citizen does not feel his cheek tingle with shame at such a recital of the facts; but it cannot be denied.” Ibid., 166.

  JOHNSON RAMBLED IN REMARKS Brooks, Lincoln Observed, 166–67.

 
(DEFENDERS SAY HE WAS FIGHTING ILLNESS) Gordon-Reed, Andrew Johnson, 82–84.

  (HE WAS DRUNK) Ibid., 83–84. “Johnson,” Gordon-Reed wrote, “was like a drunken best man at a wedding giving an interminable and embarrassing toast.” Ibid., 84.

  AN ANGRY, SELF-PITYING SPEECH Foner, Reconstruction, 249. It was, Foner wrote, “Johnson at his worst—self-absorbed (in a speech one hour long he referred to himself over 200 times), intolerant of criticism, and out of touch with political reality.” Ibid.

  “WHO, I ASK, HAS SUFFERED MORE” Andrew Johnson, “Speech to the Citizens of Washington,” February 22, 1866, TeachingAmericanHistory.org, http://teachingamericanhistory.org/​library/​document/​speech-to-the-citizens-of-washington/.

  HE ATTACKED RADICAL REPUBLICANS Foner, Forever Free, 117.

  ASSERTED THAT FEDERAL STEPS Johnson, “Speech to the Citizens of Washington,” February 22, 1866.

  CONSIDERING HAVING HIM ASSASSINATED Ibid. See also Foner, Reconstruction, 249.

  “IF MY BLOOD” Johnson, “Speech to the Citizens of Washington,” February 22, 1866.

  U. S. GRANT WON THE WHITE HOUSE For Grant’s presidency, see Jean Edward Smith, Grant (New York, 2001), 455–605; Josiah Bunting III, Ulysses S. Grant (New York, 2004); Ron Chernow, Grant (New York, 2017), 614–858.

  THE UNION GENERAL THOMAS EWING, JR. Pollard, Lost Cause Regained, 166.

  “BLOOD IS THICKER” Ibid.

  “THERE HAS NEVER BEEN” Joan Waugh, “Ulysses S. Grant, Historian” in Memory of Civil War in American Culture, 17.

  “THE PRINCIPLE FOR WHICH WE CONTENDED” Pollard, Lost Cause: A New Southern History, 749.

  RATIFICATION OF THE FIFTEENTH AMENDMENT Smith, Grant, 543.

  WAS “A MEASURE OF” Ulysses S. Grant, “Special Message,” March 30, 1870, American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/​ws/​?pid=70628.

  “TO THE RACE MORE FAVORED” Ibid.

  PASSAGE OF THE ENFORCEMENT ACT Trelease, White Terror, 385; Smith, Grant, 543–48.