Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction

by Allen C. Guelzo

  After six decades of Jacksonian hands-off-slavery policies in Washington, the Freedmen’s Bureau was an unprecedented venture into new administrative waters—so unprecedented that the scope of the bureau’s enabling legislation was far from clear. Title to the lands that the bureau distributed was only “such title thereto as the United States can convey,” which meant that it could easily be challenged in the state courts by former landowners. The freedmen, clearly, had no compunction about taking over their former masters’ lands as their own. “We has a right to the land where we are located,” explained a freedman named Bayley Wyat. “For why? I tell you.”

  Our wives, our children, our husbands has been sold over and over again to purchase the lands we now locates upon; for that reason we have a divine right to the land. … And den didn’t we clear the land, and raise de crops ob corn, ob cotton, ob rice, ob sugar, ob everything. And den didn’t dem large cities in de North grow up on de cotton and de sugars and de rice dat we made …? I say dey has grown rich and my people poor.46

  But how far were white Northerners willing to go in support of what could easily appear as a cynical strategy to extend civil rights to the freedpeople, and then buy their votes with confiscated Southern property? William Tecumseh Sherman, who otherwise lavished no affection on black people, seemed to be willing to go quite a long way when he issued Special Field Orders No. 15, setting aside “the islands from Charleston south, the abandoned rice-fields along the rivers for thirty miles back from the sea, and the country bordering the Saint John’s River, Fla. … for the settlement of the negroes now made free by the acts of war and the proclamation of the President of the United States … so that each family shall have a plot of not more than forty acres of tillable ground … in the possession of which land the military authorities will afford them protection until such time as they can protect themselves or until Congress shall regulate their title.”47

  But in reality, this was an agreement Sherman had made only after warnings from Halleck in December 1864 that Sherman was attracting unwanted attention for his “almost criminal dislike to the negro,” and only under the eye of Secretary of War Stanton, who had come down to Savannah on January 11 to make some not-so-discreet inquiries about “the negro question.” Even then, Special Field Orders No. 15 only granted the freedmen “a possessory title” to their forty acres, subject to “all claims or conflicts that may arise under the same”—which could mean very nearly nothing.48

  In fact, just how tone-deaf Sherman might really be to “the negro question” became manifest when Sherman met with Joseph Johnston to negotiate the surrender of Johnston’s broken-down army of Confederates at Durham Station, North Carolina, on April 18. Sherman offered Johnston the kind of terms he thought Lincoln had authorized: the disbanding of all remaining Confederate armies, which were to “deposit their arms and public property” in their respective state arsenals; a general amnesty; reestablishment of the federal courts; and “the recognition by the Executive of the United States, of the several State governments, on their officers and Legislatures taking the oaths prescribed by the Constitution of the United States. …” No judgment, trials, or imprisonment, no mention of slavery, and certainly no allusion to black civil rights.49

  These arrangements were far beyond Sherman’s powers as an army commander to grant, even in the fairest of seasons; and as Sherman was to learn, they were infinitely beyond what Stanton as secretary of war and the Radicals in Congress were willing to tolerate. One of Sherman’s staff members hand-carried the surrender terms to Washington, where Stanton read them on the afternoon of April 21. That evening Stanton called in Grant and erupted, and the next day Stanton released a public repudiation of Sherman’s agreement and sent Grant down to North Carolina to rein him in. Humiliated, Sherman withdrew the surrender terms and accepted Johnston’s surrender on April 26 on terms similar to those Grant had written out for Lee at Appomattox. Any freed slave who imagined that Northern whites such as Sherman were eager to join in redrawing titles, laws, and property rights, or that the Freedmen’s Bureau had some plenary authority to remake the world, might be in for a highly unpleasant surprise.50

  If it looked as though William Tecumseh Sherman was taking away with one hand what he had just given with the other, he was a model of pristine consistency compared to the new president, Andrew Johnson. The selection of Andrew Johnson as Lincoln’s running mate in the 1864 election was a baffling proposition even to people who knew both of them. Johnson was an old-line Tennessee Democrat who worshipped at the political shrine of the man Lincoln loathed, Andrew Jackson. But like Jackson, his saving grace was his fervent Unionism. Appointed military governor of Tennessee in 1862, Johnson had meted out a harsh justice to rebel planters and promised black Tennesseans in 1864 that he would “be your Moses, and lead you through the Red Sea of war and bondage to a fairer future of liberty and peace.” It was public commentary of that sort, along with Lincoln’s anxiety to demonstrate how Southern yeomen were turning their backs on the Confederacy, that earned Johnson his place on the National Union Ticket. Lincoln overlooked the fact that Johnson’s Unionism was really an expression of his yeoman’s suspicion of the planter class, not of sympathy for black slaves. “Damn the Negroes,” Johnson told one Tennessee correspondent, “I am fighting these traitorous aristocrats, their masters”; even Johnson’s private secretary, William G. Moore, admitted that Johnson “exhibited a morbid distress and feeling against the negroes.”51

  Initially, the Radical Republicans made the same mistake about Johnson, largely because a good many of them shared Johnson’s animus toward the South’s “traitorous aristocrats.” On the afternoon of the day Lincoln died, a delegation of Radicals headed by Ben Wade (as the chair of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War) called on Johnson to take his political temperature, and Johnson enthusiastically assured them that they could “judge of my policy by my past. … Treason is a crime; and crime must be punished. … Treason must be made infamous and traitors must be impoverished.” This sounded, to the Radicals, like an endorsement for land redistribution, raising the bar of Reconstruction in the South, and recruiting the freed slaves to fashion a new political order. “Johnson, we have faith in you,” boomed Wade. “By the gods, there will be no trouble now in running the government.” And Johnson fortified Wade’s confidence two days later by suggesting that a good example might be set to traitors by hanging a good baker’s dozen of the Confederate leaders. Zebulon Vance and Joseph E. Brown, the Confederate governors of North Carolina and Georgia, were arrested; Jefferson Davis was finally captured by Federal cavalry near Irwinville, Georgia, on May 10, and imprisoned in Fortress Monroe. Although Booth was tracked down by the army and shot to death in a barn in northern Virginia on April 26, scores of suspects were arrested by Stanton and eight were put on trial before a hard-jawed military tribunal. Four of them were hanged on July 7.52

  And yet, for all the appearances of grim-faced radicalism in Johnson, Wade and his colleagues could not have been more wrong about the new president. Not only was Johnson’s support for Reconstruction limited to what it could do for poor whites rather than freed blacks, but Johnson’s Democratic political instincts set him against almost every other part of the Republican agenda, including tariffs, the new national banking system, the use of paper money rather than specie by the federal government, and federal investment in internal improvements. “The war of finance is the next war we have to fight,” Johnson prophesied, and that included” prohibitory tariffs” and “the manufacturers and men of capital in the Eastern States”—in other words, precisely the people Lincoln and the Republicans had championed. “The aristocracy based on $3,000,000,000 of property in slaves … has disappeared,” Johnson rejoiced,

  but an aristocracy, based on over $2,500,000,000 of national securities, has arisen in the Northern states, to assume that political control which the consolidation of great financial and political interest formerly gave to the slave oligarchy. … We have all read h
istory, and is it not certain, that of all aristocracies mere wealth is the most odious, rapacious, and tyrannical? It goes for the last dollar the poor helpless have got; and with such a vast machine as this government under its control, that dollar will be fetched. It is an aristocracy that can see in the people only a prey for extortion.53

  If Johnson had a solution to the problems posed by the freedpeople, it was bounded on one side by his refusal to grant former slaves any kind of political equality with white men, and on the other by Johnson’s conclusion that the best conclusion to the story of black people in America would be a fast ship to Africa. “There is a great problem before us,” Johnson informed a black regiment, drawn up for his review, on October 10, 1865, “whether this race can be incorporated and mixed with the people of the United States … If it should be so that the two races cannot agree and live in peace and prosperity,” then “they are to be taken to their land of inheritance and promise, for such a one is before them.”54

  Just how deeply the Radicals had misjudged Johnson became apparent when Johnson issued his own plan for a presidential Reconstruction on May 29, 1865. It was, for all intents and purposes, what Sherman had offered Joe Johnston, only in more spacious detail. Pardons, restoration of confiscated property, and restored civil rights were extended to all but the uppermost echelons of the former Confederate leadership, and even they were permitted by “special application” to be pardoned. And to smooth the path to restoration, Johnson added a series of proclamations appointing interim provisional governors and urging the writing of new state constitutions based upon the voter qualifications in force at the time of secession in 1861—which meant, in large but invisible letters, no blacks. The governors would organize state conventions that would repudiate the state’s secession ordinance, disallow any obligation to pay off Confederate war debts, and write new voting laws; then regular elections for governor, state legislature, and Congress could be held, and the new state legislatures would ratify the Thirteenth Amendment. And in the process, former Confederate soldiers and officers who retook control of the new state conventions could keep the freedpeople as close to legal peonage as possible.55 Both Radical and moderate Republicans were stupefied. “My Dear Wade,” wrote Charles Sumner to Bluff Ben, “the rebels are all springing into their old life, & the copperheads also. This is the President’s work. … We must let him know frankly, that we will not follow his fatal lead. … We must also let the country know that we will not consent to this sacrifice.” The anti-slavery evangelist Charles Grandison Finney denounced Johnson as a “piece of rottenness under the nose of God” and prayed that God would “put him to bed.” But Johnson was undaunted; and since Congress would not reconvene until December, there was little (as Lincoln had anticipated) to prevent the president from running the show pretty much on his own until then.56

  As he passed out pardons on application, Johnson proceeded to appoint provisional governors for North Carolina on May 29, Mississippi on June 13, Georgia and Texas on June 17, Alabama on June 21, South Carolina on June 30, and Florida on July 11 (he also recognized as legitimate the Unionist state governments that had already been erected in Virginia, Louisiana, Arkansas, and his own Tennessee). Instead of being hanged, Confederate leaders were at first surprised by Johnson’s generosity, then relieved, and then defiant. None of the reconstructed governments extended voting rights to the freedmen; South Carolina even balked at repudiating its share of Confederate debt. Carl Schurz, on a fact-finding tour of the South, believed that the surrenders of the Confederate armies had made public opinion in the Southern states “so despondent that if readmission at some future time under whatever conditions had been promised, it would have been looked upon as a favor.” But when “day after day went by without bringing the disasters and inflictions which had been vaguely anticipated,” Southerners grew more secure and resistant, “until at last the appearance of [Johnson’s amnesty] proclamation substituted new hopes for them.” As soon as “they found that the control of everything was to be again put in their hands,” wrote one frantic observer to Lyman Trumbull, “they became insolent … drunk with power, ruling and abusing every loyal man, white and black.” Christopher Memminger put it more simply: Johnson “held up before us the hope of a ‘white man’s government,’ and this led us to set aside negro suffrage. … It was natural that we should yield to our old prejudices.”57

  This overreach, however, was the undoing of presidential Reconstruction. Several southern conventions only repealed secession rather than repudiating it, the new state legislature in Mississippi refused to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, and a few states ratified the amendment but only with the proviso that the states and not the federal government had the right to determine the political future of the freed-people. In Arkansas, the legislature actually appropriated funds to pay pensions to Confederate veterans. In a series of “Black Codes,” Mississippi and South Carolina passed labor laws that bound blacks to employers almost as tightly as slavery once bound them to masters. Other codes established patterns of racial segregation that had been impossible under slavery, barred African Americans from serving on juries or offering testimony in court against whites, made “vagrancy,” “insulting gestures,” and “mischief” offenses by blacks punishable by fines or imprisonment, forbade black-white intermarriage, and banned ownership by blacks of “fire-arms of any kind, or any ammunition, dirk or bowie-knife.”58

  The most visibly outrageous result of presidential Reconstruction involved the people who found top-level state employment in the Johnson governments, and the representatives they sent to Washington to sit in Congress. Across the lower South, former Confederates moved right back into the places of state power they had held before the war. Alexander Stephens, former Confederate vice president and now pardoned by Johnson, was elected by the Georgia legislature to the Senate; Herschel V. Johnson, who had sat in the Confederate Congress, was picked for the other Georgia Senate seat. In the House of Representatives, Cullen Battle, until recently a Confederate general, showed up to represent Alabama; William T. Wofford, who had commanded a Confederate brigade at Gettysburg, was there for Georgia; two of Virginia’s eight representatives had been members of the state secession convention in 1861. Along with the restoration of white power came an upsurge of anti-black violence. “You have doubtless heard a great deal of the Reconstructed South, of their acceptance of the results of the war,” wrote a Freedmen’s Bureau agent in South Carolina. “This may all be true, but if a man … had the list of Negroes murdered in a single county in this most loyal and Christian state, he would think it a strange way of demonstrating his kindly feelings toward them.”59

  When Congress finally reassembled in December 1865, the mutterings against presidential Reconstruction had become loud and irritated. The representatives of the new Johnson-approved governments appeared on December 4 to take their seats, but the clerk of the House of Representatives, Edward McPherson (whose property at Gettysburg had been fought over on July 1, 1863), omitted their names from the roll call and refused to recognize them. The House Radicals, with Thaddeus Stevens in the lead, then seized the initiative by referring the entire matter of Reconstruction to a joint House-Senate Committee on Reconstruction (which would be, for all practical purposes, a reincarnation of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War), thus grabbing the oversight of Reconstruction out of Johnson’s hands, as Ben Wade and Henry Winter Davis had tried to do in 1864. In the Senate, Wade and Sumner were ready with a bill for black voting rights in the District of Columbia and resolutions banning the readmittance to the Union of any state that did not also endorse equal voting rights for all adult males, regardless of color. “I deny the right of these States to pass these laws against men who are citizens of the United States,” spluttered Henry Wilson, and he was seconded by Lyman Trumbull of Illinois, who introduced a federal civil rights bill just after the New Year that contained a forthright definition of federal citizenship, based on jus soli: “All persons born in the Uni
ted States … are hereby declared to be citizens of the United States,” declared the new bill, “and such citizens, of every race and color … shall have the same right, in every State and Territory in the United States … as is enjoyed by white citizens.”60

  But Wilson and Trumbull were soon to learn that Reconstruction was no easier to accomplish in Congress than in the White House. Wilson was promptly interrupted by John Sherman of Ohio, who pointed out that “there is scarcely a State in the Union that does not make distinctions on account of color. … Is it the purpose of this bill to wipe out all these distinctions?” And in the House of Representatives, Wisconsin Democrat Charles Eldridge accused the promoters of the civil rights legislation of an “insidious and dangerous” plan to “lay prostrate at the feet of the Federal Government the judiciary of the States.” The only citizenship Eldridge knew was the citizenship of the states: “I hold that the rights of the States are the rights of the Union, and that the rights of the States and the liberty of the States are essential to the liberty of the individual citizen.” Garret Davis of Kentucky called the bill “a bald, naked attempt to usurp power and to bring all the sovereign and reserved powers of the States to the foot of a tyrannical and despotic faction in Congress,” crying that it gave the vote “to a race of men who throughout their whole history, in every country and condition in which they have ever been placed, have demonstrated their utter inability for self-government.”61