The Freedmen’s Bureau coordinated the educational activities of the various church groups. By 1869, the Bureau oversaw three thousand schools serving 150,000 black pupils. In many parts of the South, the black freedom schools were the first public schools of any kind. In a meritocratic society, education is the great leveler. Being born a slave was not a permanent bar on aspiration. In order to achieve independence and financial security, however, education, as much as work, was essential. Even former slaves from the most isolated districts of the South understood the value of an education.
Coming south to educate blacks required not only conviction but also courage. The teachers often received a hostile reception from native whites. A Quaker teacher in Clarksville, Tennessee, believed that local whites “would have been glad of the opportunity to have poisoned us. No white person spoke to us, and the town people never moved an inch on the walk for us.” From North Carolina, teacher Margaret Thorpe wrote to a friend up north, “You can’t imagine how strange it seems never to speak to a white person, and have absolutely no social life, not one visitor.”44
“Teaching the Freedmen” 1866. Visitors to the South immediately after the war invariably commented on the freedmen’s thirst for education. Classrooms often contained several generations, as this one did. (Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture, the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilder Foundations)
Silence was preferable to some of the epithets directed at the émigrés. A teacher in Virginia wrote, “From one set of [white] students … I habitually received the polite salutation of ‘damned Yankee bitch of a nigger teacher.’” Sisters Lucy and Sarah Chase recounted similar experiences in South Carolina, including a neighbor woman who could not imagine why they would come to teach blacks, adding, “I’d poison a Yankee in a moment, if I could get a chance.”45
Verbal assaults were not the greatest of concerns for Yankee teachers. Alonzo B. Corliss, a partially crippled teacher at a Quaker school for blacks in Louisiana, was dragged out of his house by masked men and given thirty lashes with rawhide and hickory sticks for the crime of “teaching niggers and making them like white men.” They shaved one side of his head, painted it black, and suggested that he leave town forthwith. Corliss received no solace from local Southern Baptists, who condemned him for teaching “politics rather than religion” and “equal suffrage rather than repentance.” The Baptists had a point. The curriculum of many of these schools included reading lessons in the Bible, the Emancipation Proclamation, the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and speeches by Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. The instructors also taught the importance of self-reliance and obedience to the law. These lessons were undoubtedly not the kind of instruction southern whites would have preferred for blacks.46
Some missionaries lived in a constant state of terror. A teacher in Americus, Georgia, noted, “I sometimes feel so utterly helpless and alone and have so many severe and bitter [experiences] to bear that I yell at times. I cannot bear it. My life is in danger every hour.” Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. DuBois, who did not agree on much, both praised the courage and value of these teachers. “Whenever it is written—and I hope it will be,” Washington stated, “the part that the Yankee teachers played in the education of the Negroes immediately after the war will make one of the most thrilling parts of the history of this country.” DuBois in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) called the teachers “the gift of New England to the freed Negro, not alms, but a friend; not cash, but character.… In actual formal content their curriculum was doubtless old-fashioned, but in educational power it was supreme, for it was the contact of living souls.”47
Their faith and the eagerness of their pupils drove these teachers. Whitelaw Reid stood amazed at “the feverish anxiety for initiation into the mysteries of print, everywhere strikingly manifest among the negroes.” On plantations, it was not unusual for the workers to ask former masters to reserve some of their wages to hire a teacher for their children. The pupils were not only eager, they were also apt. Reid commented, “In reading and writing I do not hesitate to say that the average progress of the children of plantation hands … is fully equal to the average progress of white children at the North.” Not to mention white children in the South. Reid claimed that about 60 percent of Charleston’s blacks could read, while only 12 percent of the city’s white population was literate. A black resident explained the discrepancy to Reid: “Dey [whites] haven’t learned, because dey don’t care; we, because dey wouldn’t let us.”48
John Trowbridge encountered the same indifference among whites and enthusiasm among blacks for education. The public school superintendent of Chattanooga informed Trowbridge, “The colored people are far more zealous in the cause of education than the whites. They will starve themselves and go without clothes in order to send their children to school.” The schools they attended were likely to be shabby affairs, converted sheds, old buildings “good for little else,” and churches where the students knelt, using pew benches as desks. In Savannah, the most commodious black school was the former slave mart, where teachers taught their students in the large auction room or in the jail over it.49
The rapid ascent of black literacy testified to freedmen’s enthusiasm. In Richmond, for example, by 1870, almost one third of the adult black population could read and write, compared with less than 10 percent in 1865. Joseph Wilson, a former slave who attended classes, attested to “this longing of ours for freedom of the mind as well as the body.” In May 1867, Harper’s made an announcement that likely caused some initial confusion among readers until they read through. At the end of an article touting the educational successes of African Americans in the South, the editor declared that Jefferson Davis’s proposal for arming the slaves had come to fruition, adding, “but in a very different manner from that proposed by him.”50
In many ways, the former slaves were the South’s modernists. They came out of the war with unbounded optimism, eager to accept both the promise and challenge of freedom. They aspired to the same status as the young men and women coming to northern cities or moving out West. They wanted personal and financial independence. They sought land, jobs, and education. They reunited with their families. They established their own churches and associations. Their theology reflected the optimism of their new freedom. They had lived the Book of Exodus. Now they would enter the Promised Land. There was no need to bind themselves up and follow an orthodoxy of thought and action in order to reconcile with the Lord. They had already been saved, and they expressed their faith accordingly in animated and joyous worship. They did everything, in short, to make themselves productive American citizens.
White southerners, on the other hand, nursed their wounds and grievances. They did not, in fact, come out of the war. They remained mired in its mud, gore, and death. They looked backward to the Old South, not forward like northerners or African Americans. There were some prominent merchants and newspapermen in southern cities who promoted economic development just as hard as their northern counterparts. But this so-called New South Creed was a fraud as much as the professions of contrition and reconciliation. The refusal of southern churches to rejoin their northern denominational brethren provided a better indication of southern attitudes. These would-be entrepreneurs wanted to diversify the southern economy and attract northern investment, but they did not invite northern ideas or enterprises that would upset the social and political structure.51
All to keep the black man down in his place. For every time a white southerner encountered a black person in the years just after the war, the white was reminded of the defeat, the destruction, the society turned upside down, and his own reduced circumstances. Freedmen reminded the white southerner that there was much work to accomplish before redemption occurred, and the reduction of the black man stood high on the agenda of restoration. They feared God and they feared to think differently. The white southerner stood as the greatest obstacle to the success of the freedman. No Horatio Alger tale
provided a recipe for how to get around this barrier.
It was for this reason that African Americans looked hopefully to the federal government in the early days of peace. The Union war had liberated the slaves and a nation. Northerners had paid a heavy price to achieve those objectives. They would not allow them to slip away in the warm glow of peace and prosperity. Or so the former slaves hoped.
CHAPTER 18
A GOLDEN MOMENT
ANDREW JOHNSON WAS NO ABRAHAM LINCOLN. On that there was general agreement. Although some of the biographical details sounded familiar—the birth of low circumstances, the frequent uprooting as a child, and the life in a small town with a modest career that eventually led to politics—the respective individuals were quite different. Johnson was a Democrat, a firm believer in minimum government. A tailor by trade, he rose through the tumultuous ranks of Tennessee politics to become a U.S. senator. Like many other whites of his social class in east Tennessee, he disdained the plantation owners further west, their airs, their slaves, and their influence. Stocky in build, he dressed impeccably and exuded a polish that was acquired rather than inherited. Men appreciated Johnson’s direct, sometimes blunt manner, but he could be stubborn and, when pressed, intemperate in his language.1
Johnson’s sensitivity derived from insecurity over how far he had come in the world. He told his rags-to-riches story often, mostly for his own benefit. Perhaps the greatest distinction from Lincoln was Johnson’s total lack of humor. He did not see any purpose in cultivating it in himself and he neither understood nor appreciated its demonstration in others. While he had little use for slavery, he had less regard for the black man, whose inherent and permanent inferiority he did not question. Johnson seemed most invigorated in opposition. While Lincoln’s position on several key issues, including emancipation, evolved during the war, and he seemed open to the opinions of others, Johnson remained fixed in his views. He took differing opinions as personal affronts and clung to his position that much more fiercely.
Johnson’s tenacity served him well during the war. He refused to join his southern colleagues in their abandonment of the nation’s capital when the Civil War began. Johnson became a hero to the Radical Republicans, who hailed his courage and fortitude as they fought Lincoln on his tardy conversion to abolition and his mild views on postwar reconstruction. He assumed the presidency in tragic circumstances. The tailor was handed the task of mending the nation.
Historians have forever asked the question “What would Lincoln have done had he lived?” Would the outcome of Reconstruction been different, better, or worse? It is, of course, impossible to know, but wonderful to speculate. Lincoln never developed a comprehensive reconstruction plan, and, even if he had, given the skill with which he responded to events as they unfolded, he might very well have thrown his initial plan out the window.
During the relatively brief time Lincoln considered reconstruction policy, several general principles emerged. He hoped that the seceding states would return to full-fledged membership in the Union as soon as possible. To do so, the former Confederate states must accept the supremacy of federal authority and the demise of slavery. He had no desire to carry out a campaign of retribution against Confederate leaders. As for the former slaves, he held the same view as most northern whites, that the freedmen’s path to success lay as workers for wages. He did not advocate land redistribution, but he did not rule it out. He believed blacks should vote, but perhaps only those who were literate and who served in Union forces. Lincoln would not require black suffrage as a prerequisite for the restoration of a state to full status in the Union. The Union was paramount to Lincoln, both in the war and in the coming peace.
In his December 1863 message to Congress, Lincoln announced a Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction offering the Rebels “full pardon … with restoration of all rights of property, except as to slaves.” High-ranking Confederate officials would have to take a loyalty oath. He promised to extend recognition to the reorganized states when as few as 10 percent of their voting-age population took an oath of allegiance. This was a wartime measure, meant to encourage Unionism in the occupied states, and not a portent of Lincoln’s reconstruction policies. Louisiana was the first state to take up the proposal. About eleven thousand voters who promised to support the Union and agreed to abide by the Emancipation Proclamation elected a governor and a state legislature. The new government, however, did not provide for black suffrage.2
Lincoln admitted that he wished Louisiana had conferred voting rights on at least “the very intelligent freedmen.” But it was a start. “Concede,” he argued, “that the new government of Louisiana is only to what it should be as the egg is to the fowl, we shall sooner have the fowl by hatching the egg than by smashing it.” Lincoln wanted to generate as much white support as possible. If he had insisted on black suffrage, it would have derailed the efforts of loyal Union men in Louisiana to gain readmission to the Union. As a constitutionalist, he was deeply concerned about the legitimacy of governments if they rested on a minority of citizens for too long a time. Above all he was a Unionist, and he wanted the nation whole. The Republican Party was still very much a sectional party. If a conciliatory reconstruction policy could help build the party in the South, this would also strengthen the Union.3
The Radical Republicans in Congress rejected Louisiana’s new representatives and framed their own reconstruction plan, “the main object of which was to counteract the mild and tolerant policy of the Administration.” The Wade-Davis bill increased the threshold of eligibility to 50 percent of the voting-age population and barred former Confederate officials from participating. It avoided the issue of black suffrage, as the Radicals understood it would have opened the subject for discussion in the North, where many states barred black residents from voting. Lincoln pocket-vetoed the bill, which, even if implemented, never had a chance of success given the high threshold of loyal citizens it required. The episode highlighted the two dominant themes of reconstruction policy: the tug-of-war between Congress and the president, and the contest over the degree of federal imposition on the rebellious states.4
Lincoln was a practical man. He chafed at theoretical debates over whether the seceding states had committed “state suicide,” thereby requiring an apprentice period, much like the territories, to gain readmission to the Union. What counted now was whether the Rebel states wanted to be part of the American enterprise. “Finding themselves safely at home,” he noted in one of his last ruminations on the subject on April 11, 1865, “it would be utterly immaterial whether they had ever been abroad.” He also acknowledged that the process of formulating, let alone implementing, a reconstruction policy could be long and contentious before a consensus emerged. Lincoln understood how much “we, the loyal people, differ among ourselves as to the mode, manner, and means of reconstruction.” Compromise, the essence of democratic government, would be necessary.5
At his final cabinet meetings during the week of April 10, he was open-minded about a spectrum of policies, including military occupation and black enfranchisement. He wanted an expeditious reconstruction of the Union, but he also wanted it to be fair. Like the good inventor he was, he recognized reconstruction as a work in progress and was prepared to alter the course, if necessary. He returned again to the issue of legitimacy, believing that any federal imposition ran the risk of losing the support of the majority of the white population. “We can’t undertake to run State governments,” he told his cabinet. “Their people must do that—I reckon that at first some of them may do it badly.” He would adjust his program accordingly.6
In one of the greater misjudgments in American history, the Radicals believed that Lincoln’s removal would aid their cause. At least Johnson would be tougher than his predecessor, “whose tenderness to the Rebels” and views on reconstruction were as “distasteful as possible.” Johnson, it turned out, wanted reconstruction to proceed as quickly as Lincoln. He expressed no commitment to voting rights, land grants, or civil equ
ality for the freedmen. Johnson wished blacks no ill, nor good. He explained his inattention to black voting rights by noting that blacks possessed less “capacity for government than any other race of people.… Wherever they have been left to their own devices they have shown a constant tendency to relapse into barbarism.” Black suffrage, therefore, would result in “a tyranny such as this continent has never yet witnessed.”7
Johnson had a clear field to formulate a reconstruction, or “restoration,” policy, as he called it, as Congress was out of session. The president’s preferred term implied a return to what had been. He required an oath of allegiance in exchange for amnesty and the restoration of property and called for the election of state conventions to formally abolish slavery, nullify state ordinances of secession, and repudiate Confederate debts. Johnson barred high-ranking Confederate officers and officials, as well as those individuals worth more than twenty thousand dollars (reflecting his lifelong animosity against wealthy planters) from taking the oath. They could, however, petition for pardons. Soon, Washington, D.C., was crowded with former Confederate civilian and military leaders petitioning the president. Of the 15,000 southerners who applied, 13,500 received pardons.8
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