The Confederacy’s losses were numerically less—a hundred thousand fewer soldiers killed and wounded than the North. But that represented a higher percentage of its eligible men. The future for the South’s nine million white residents and four million former slaves looked dire.
From Richmond to Atlanta, ruined neighborhoods were disfigured by burnt-out stores and warehouses. Miles of streets were overrun with weeds. Thousands of widows had no support at all. Destitute blacks and whites were living in shelters thrown together on the cities’ outskirts while hordes of black men roamed the desolate landscape looking for wives and children who had been sold into other states.
Former slaves were often at the mercy of the Black Codes, the state laws passed soon after Johnson became president.
White lawmakers in South Carolina decreed that if a black man aspired to any work except as a farmer or a servant, he must apply for a license from a judge and pay an annual tax that ranged from ten dollars to one hundred dollars.
Mississippi demanded that a black man present proof to the white mayor of his city that he had a home and a job.
Louisiana representatives modified their law to require that all heads of working families must sign contracts within the first ten days of each year that committed them and their children to work on a plantation.
In North Carolina, orphans were sent to work for the former masters of their families rather than allowing them to live with grandparents or other relatives. Violating an owner’s rules would be considered “disobedience” and punished with a dollar fine for each infraction.
In Kentucky, all contracts had to be approved by a white citizen.
Florida law made either disobedience or “impudence” a form of vagrancy, and a vagrant could be whipped.
And a more subtle maltreatment: For months, some slaves had gone on working at their plantations because their owners had kept the news from them that they had been set free.
Their sponsors often justified the Black Codes as protection for the former slaves. Inflexible contracts were required, they claimed, because rootless black men could not survive a free competition for jobs. One South Carolinian predicted that they would perish because they would fail in the “struggle for life with a superior race.”
In the fall of 1865, General Grant went south at President Johnson’s request to check on the operations of the Freedmen’s Bureau. Grant’s report admitted that his tour had been hurried and that he could not give the bureau the attention he would have preferred.
But Grant said that conversations with bureau officials had convinced him that “in some states its affairs had not been conducted with good judgment or economy.” Grant praised Howard as “the able head of the bureau” who “made friends by the just and fair instructions he gave.” He added, however, that many on Howard’s staff were encouraging unrealistic expectations among the former slaves.
Overall, Grant found that since Southerners were accepting the new realities, extending the life of the bureau would be unnecessary, even harmful.
• • •
The president had to weigh Grant’s judgment against a contradictory report from Carl Schurz, the thirty-six-year-old German-American journalist.
After studying at the University of Bonn, Schurz had become caught up in the revolution sweeping through Germany. When the uprising failed, he escaped through European capitals, coming to rest by the mid-1850s in Milwaukee. In 1860, he campaigned in German for Lincoln, who sent him as ambassador to Spain to prevent the country from siding with the Confederacy.
Schurz returned to become a brigadier general of volunteers, and at the Battle of Chancellorville, he had quarreled over strategy with General Howard in the hours before Stonewall Jackson’s decisive victory. For Howard, the president’s choosing Schurz to assess the Freedmen’s Bureau did not seem auspicious.
• • •
Meeting with Andrew Johnson before he left Washington, Schurz became another Radical lulled by the president’s credo: “Arson is a crime, robbery is a crime, murder is a crime, and treason is a crime worse than them all.”
Schurz was persuaded that Johnson intended to break up the South’s plantations and parcel out their land as small farms. He thought he also detected vague hints from the president that “colored people should have some part in the reconstruction of their states.”
Initially, Johnson’s request that Schurz inspect conditions throughout the former Confederacy was unapplealing to him, partly because he would be traveling during July and August, the hottest months of the year. But at the War Department, Edwin Stanton was urging him to accept the assignment because the president was getting all kinds of advice and needed to hear from someone who would tell him the truth.
Although Stanton sent a captain from the New York Volunteers as an escort to his first stop in South Carolina, Schurz’s education began on the steamer trip to the town of Hilton Head.
He had struck up a conversation with a well-spoken former Confederate army officer, like Schurz in his midthirties. The fellow described his prewar life as a prosperous plantation owner with ninety slaves on four thousand acres of land near Savannah.
He was returning home after a prolonged stay in a Northern hospital, and he anticipated that General Sherman’s march through Georgia had left him destitute. Since he seemed utterly without hope for the future, Schurz tried to brighten his spirits by suggesting that he could contact his former slaves and invite them back to work as free laborers under a fair contract.
Schurz saw the man grow animated, even excited. “What? Contract with those niggers? It would never work.”
Schurz persisted, but the man was adamant: Why, was not President Johnson a Southerner, and did he not know equally well that the nigger would not work without compulsion?
Schurz tried a different tack. The man could sell off part of his land and farm the rest for himself. As Schurz recalled, the response was equally disbelieving: “The idea that he should work with his hands as a farmer seemed to strike him as ludicrously absurd. He told me with a smile that he had never done a day’s work of that kind in his life.
“He mused for a while in sad silence, and said at last, ‘No, I can’t sell my plantation. We must make the nigger work somehow.’ ”
It was the conclusion Schurz would hear dozens of times over the next three months: To get a Negro to work required physical compulsion.
• • •
Schurz was disturbed as well by the way Southern whites were venting their anger at losing the war. He detected throughout the former Confederacy “an entire absence of that national spirit, which forms the basis of true loyalty and patriotism.”
In hospitals, Schurz found black women as well as men whose bodies had been beaten and their ears cut off. “Dead Negroes were found in considerable numbers in the country roads or on the fields, shot to death, or strung on the limbs of trees.”
Schurz was appalled by evidence of the “almost insane state of irritation” among Southern whites. He recommended continued control of the South by the federal government. Anything less “may result in bloody collisions and will certainly plunge Southern society into restless fluctuations and anarchical confusions.”
Blacks throughout the South already knew they could not expect relief from the reports of Grant or Schurz, however well meant. They were collecting accounts of fellow Negroes being whipped and killed, and no one being punished.
• • •
Much as Oliver Howard wanted to end that injustice, he was hindered by the patchwork nature of his assignment. Each of the eleven Confederate states had its own leaders, needs, and responses to its defeat. Abuses had cropped up in Louisiana even before Lincoln was assassinated, and yet Charles Sumner in Washington had gone along reluctantly with a plan to readmit the state. Under the direction of Nathaniel Banks, the state’s constitutional convention had met the principal requirement by voting to abolish slavery by seventy-two to thirteen.
His service in Louisiana had
brought Banks’s thinking closer to that of Ben Butler, the man he replaced. When the convention appeared ready to restrict voting to white citizens, Banks intervened. Overnight, working with the civilian governor, he persuaded forty delegates to change their votes.
The result was a resolution that opened the way to Negro suffrage. Its language had been kept deliberately cloudy, but many white delegates agreed with the New Orleans man who denounced it as “a nigger resolution.” They vowed to continue their fight, and the Freedmen’s Bureau would become their battleground.
• • •
Oliver Howard considered education to be the major answer to his challenge and welcomed donations for schools from the North. As he waited for Congress to appropriate funds, the $770,000 that came in would be Howard’s chief source of revenue.
Many officers from his staff resigned from the bureau to return home as soon as they were mustered out, leaving Howard with little money to pay their civilian replacements. And even when local white men could be hired, Howard might decide that a candidate was not equipped for the job. He thought that members of the Georgia staff, for example, “shamefully abused” their powers.
Howard was also learning that his crusade to enroll blacks in public schools was meeting as much resistance as the campaign for voting rights. Typical was the white legislator in New Orleans who got his first look at a school opened by the Freedmen’s Bureau.
“What? For niggers?” he demanded. “Well, well, I have seen many an absurdity in my lifetime, but this is the climax!”
In fact, black parents were embracing education for their children after generations in a society that had prohibited teaching slaves to read and write. Nat Turner’s slave uprising in 1831 had made those laws even stricter. At the war’s end, fewer than 150,000 of the four million slaves were literate.
Southern white children had fared only somewhat better. Leading up to the war, fewer than half of the poor white children in Virginia had been enrolled in any school. Thomas Jefferson had once tried to set a minimum school term of eleven weeks a year. He found that plantation owners decreed that poor children did not need an education, and they refused to tax themselves for the expense.
Notable exceptions to that attitude had arisen in the Carolinas. Even before the war, North Carolina had embraced public schools, and in Charleston, South Carolina, residents celebrated Andrew Johnson’s inauguration by opening public schools to children of every race. The New York Tribune sent a reporter to assess the result.
He noted that the races were still segregated in the classroom but mingled freely on the playground. He also observed a number of students in the Negro classrooms with blue eyes and “pure white skin,” the legacy from “very old families” who “aided in obliterating all the complexional distinctions by merging their blood with that of their slaves.”
But in Mississippi, black men who donated money for a school were then forbidden to send their children to it. One white teacher arriving in Adams County was targeted for murder by four young white men but instead was only roughed up “somewhat barbarously.”
Thomas Conway, Oliver Howard’s appointee in Louisiana, warned that if Union soldiers were withdrawn from his state, whites had made it clear that the Negroes “shall not own one acre of land or have any schools.” In fact, “they are more hostile to the existence of schools than they are to owning land.”
• • •
From the outset, Howard had approached the bureau’s land policy with concern that he was acting legally. When a dispute arose between his agent, Rufus Saxton, and a Union army commander, Howard wanted reassurance from the Johnson administration before he made his ruling.
As the bureau’s assistant for South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, Saxton was enforcing a civilian order that allotted 485,000 acres of land along the Atlantic coast to forty thousand former slaves, but Major General Quincy Adams Gillmore intended to return the land to its white owners.
Both men enjoyed a military reputation. Gillmore was acclaimed for his 1862 artillery victory at Fort Pulaski near Savannah. Saxton’s equally high standing resulted from his skillful defense of Harper’s Ferry that same year.
Secretary Stanton left the arbitration to Howard, whose first compromise pleased no one: Black farmers would own the land while white families would be allowed to live on it. To resolve the dispute more satisfactorily, Howard asked for a ruling from Attorney General James Speed. But Speed refused to be trapped between congressional support for the bureau and Andrew Johnson’s own approach to reconstruction, and he bucked the decision back to Howard.
Howard bought time by requiring his staff to make title searches for all the land they intended to allocate to freedmen in their states. While that was under way, Rufus Saxton went to Washington to lobby Howard in person for policies that he already knew Howard favored. Saxton reminded him of the time the two of them had toured the Sea Islands together.
• • •
The plantations on those Atlantic islands between Charleston and Savannah had been farmed since 1861 by former slaves working for wages paid by their Northern landowners. Their children attended schools staffed by Northern teachers.
At the time when Howard had visited the island of Port Royal, Brigadier General Saxton was making his headquarters there, and the two of them invited Secretary of War Stanton for an inspection.
Sharing their enthusiasm, Stanton had promoted Saxton to major general on the spot, and in Washington, President Lincoln had agreed that Port Royal might serve as a postwar model.
Now even after Saxton pointed to the Sea Islands success, Howard hesitated to act. To prod him further, Saxton returned home and issued a circular throughout his territory that promised its freedmen their forty-acre farms on abandoned lands. Saxton wrote to Howard that the former slaves were owed no less for “two hundred years of unrequited toil.”
Saxton’s goading worked. In late July 1865 Howard issued Circular 13, his own directive on land distribution. Emboldened by his interpretation of Attorney General Speed’s ruling, Howard quoted directly from the congressional act of March 3, 1865.
Forty acres would be leased for three years to the male head of a family; the rent would be no more than 6 percent of the land’s value as appraised in 1860.
Howard foresaw the potential conflict with President Johnson that Speed had ducked. He did not intend to clear his circular with the White House, and it would be unequivocal:
“The pardon of the President will not be understood to extend to the surrender of abandoned or confiscated property.”
Thaddeus Stevens
CHAPTER 7
THADDEUS STEVENS (1865–1866)
CHARLES SUMNER HAD WANTED TO believe in Andrew Johnson. His relations with Lincoln had never been easy, despite their surface amiability and their determination to avoid a public break. During the long debate over readmitting Louisiana, Sumner had opposed the president’s policy. Yet a few days later, Lincoln pointedly invited him to escort Mrs. Lincoln to his second inaugural ball.
At the core of their dispute, Lincoln had seemed to have more faith than Sumner did in the South’s ability to reorganize its postwar society. On one issue, however, they were united. They worried that in future elections rebellious whites might end up outvoting Southerners who had stayed loyal to the Union. For Sumner, apart from simple justice, that concern was reason enough to give the ballot to former slaves.
When Sumner heard of Lincoln’s assassination on the night of April 14, he knew where he must be. He went to the house where the president had been taken and sat at his bedside sobbing from midnight until seven o’clock the next morning. Sumner was still holding Lincoln’s hand when Mary Lincoln entered the room with her son for a final look at her husband. Todd Lincoln began to cry, and Sumner offered the boy his shoulder for support.
Yet, one day later, Sumner contrived an excuse to call on Lincoln’s successor. Both men were aware that Sumner had tried to force Andrew Johnson from office because of his be
havior at the inaugural. But the meeting went well, and the next day, Johnson won over Sumner completely when he declared, “There is no difference between us.”
Sumner’s euphoria continued for months. He applauded when the new president spoke of sending the Confederate leaders into exile, and he withdrew his objection to an early recognition of Virginia that brought the state back into the Union.
During their meetings, Sumner pressed Johnson to support the right of freedmen to vote. In return, he received the president’s assurances that “you and I are alike.” Given their new fellowship, Sumner was no longer insisting that Congress, not the president, must oversee Reconstruction.
But when Sumner returned to Washington in the late spring from a vacation in Boston, he was shocked to find that Johnson intended to reorganize the Southern states exclusively with white men.
The president had appointed as governor in North Carolina a reluctant rebel named William Woods Holden, who had run as a peace candidate in 1864. Johnson required of Holden simply that he call a convention of Union loyalists to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment and repudiate the debt run up during the war.
Since Johnson had stipulated that only those who had been eligible to vote in 1861 could vote now, his decree guaranteed that black men would be excluded.
This was “inconsistent with what he said to me, and to others,” Sumner complained to Carl Schurz. It was as though Johnson were suffering from some “strange hallucination.”
• • •
Despite Andrew Johnson’s resentment of entrenched privilege, the Radicals feared that a man who had owned slaves would have more urgent priorities than justice for Oliver Howard’s freedmen.
They knew the president was besieged by appeals for pardons from former rebels, which he was granting at a rapid rate. To meet the demand, Johnson was at work by nine each morning and, stopping only for meals, receiving petitions far into the evening. Men alert for any signs of heavy drinking reported that he was taking only tea and crackers.
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