The Radical faction had no hope of ever coming to power in Texas through popular election, and they knew it. Their only hope was to precipitate an avalanche from the North, and they failed to pull strings to do so. The acts of lawlessness in Texas were exaggerated beyond reasonable belief, but there were people who believed these accounts, just as Southerners in 1859 had believed the worst about the North. A generation that cried over Uncle Tom's Cabin was demagogue meat.
Without the potent poison of political expediency being added, however, Texas would probably have been left alone. The final act of the American tragedy might have been avoided.
The Civil War ennobled no one, except perhaps its central figure, but it brought enormous and probably inevitable changes in the North. The Unionist states actually gained wealth, population, and power between 1861 and 1865, during the concurrent destruction of the Confederacy. War manufactures exploded industrial production, made agriculture prosper, and a flood of immigration from Europe more than replaced the blood and bone buried in the South. Until 1861, the full effect of the Industrial Revolution had been held in check by the powerful agronomists from Virginia to Texas. With this check removed, the industrial states consolidated their gains swiftly.
While the war itself was moving political power irresistibly toward the Federal capital in Washington, money power was centralized in New York through the wartime Currency Acts. And an enormous centralization, through economic expansion, was going on. Businesses and enterprises were being formed that soon transcended the states themselves. All these currents moved together. The removal of real power to a national capital was the first necessity for an expanded transportation and industrial complex that lay across many states. The concentration of fiscal power in New York broke the monetary freedom of state legislatures. As business enterprise became more and more national and spread on rails, old boundaries were, and had to be, meaningless. All this would, in quick time, forge a new society. The old America of a huge farming, small-holder class with a tiny mercantile and professional elite was not gone; vast islands of it remained. But it was submerged in flooding money and roaring steam.
If the men and interests behind the rise of the new industrial America did not realize fully where they were going, they understood their basic imperatives well enough. They needed certain things from government: high tariffs on industrial products; business subsidies and the diversion of public finances to railroads; centralized money control; continued massive immigration to curb native workers and create a labor pool; and a hard money policy, without which a solid financial-industrial complex was difficult to build.
The political instrument of this new force was the new Republican Party, which inherited the financial and railroad interests by default. Here other refugees from Whiggery found a home. The alliance with Western farmers, first over slavery and then because of the shared patriotic experience of the war, made this coalescing Party national, or at least, spread across the most populous and dominant states. Though some Eastern financial interests remained Democratic, and here and there pockets of small-town gentry did the same, with immigrant workers whose natural instinct was to vote against employers, Republicans absorbed the burgeoning energies and talents of the great northern tier of America as no political party had done before. The men who led it were not only capable and shrewd; they were prepared to battle strenuously for what they wanted. As virtually all foreign observers have seen, the erection of the immense American politico-industrial-financial machine after 1861 was not pure destiny; it took a certain kind of genius.
The goals of the emerging society were hardly universal, or even a majority view. The old-time, or Conservative-leaning, Democrats still had a majority of all Americans in 1860. This did not depend wholly on Southern reaction. Things were not all that good in the new industrial empire.
The new wealth was more monstrously maldistributed than it had ever been. Millions of Northern workers were little better off, in grimy tenements and working long tedious days, than Texas slaves; many, in fact, were cared for worse. Native-born workers, who had enjoyed decades of scarcity and demand, begged for a limit to flooding immigration as they were drowned. In the 19th century they were hardly sustained by the 20th-century illusion that they rose on each succeeding wave. Hard money policy pinched farmers, particularly those in the West with mortgaged lands. It made things stable for industrialists but depressed the entire debtor class.
The disparate distribution of wealth between rich and poor, which had been notably lacking in early America compared to Europe; the beginning of real urban poverty on the English scale; the denigration of labor into a working class; and the enormous power achieved by swollen corporate enterprise were some ironic results of the great crusade for middle-class democracy that the Republicans presided over between 1861 and 1865. There was more real, if less merely apparent, equality in 1859. If the war released the energies of the American industrial middle class, it also freed their vices. Shrewd, capable, immensely hard-working, and merciless, a new dominant group emerged. Adamses, Cabots, Stocktons, and Lees were not to set the standards for a new America.
The new breed was described by a French historian:
. . An unprincipled, amoral ruling class of fabulous wealth and power, of feudal barons who sliced out the new world of productive wealth . . . They no longer ruled territories and vassals but natural resources and means of communications. They were steel kings, coal kings, oil kings, industrial magnates who ruled over entirely new realms—razor blades, plumbing and fixtures, newspaper chains. There were banking empires and railroad empires whose clerks were often respectable Senators. . . . Many of these industrial corporations and trusts had become more powerful than the individual states . . . dwarfing local governments, manipulating political machines, accentuating the centralizing trend that placed every major economic problem on the national scale. The result was the cultural monstrosity known as the Gilded Age, in which a luxurious style of living was marked by the worst taste ever displayed, a lack of true distinction and refinement. . . .
Against this grimy, soon-to-be gilded age there was an enduring wail of protest, while a few Adamses, Cabots, and Roosevelts, bypassed in time and place, husbanded a pale form of aristocracy and survived. Lincoln was barely reelected in 1864, by only 200,000 votes. The Republican-industrial alliance had gained two priceless assets out of the war: the destruction of organized, ably led opposition from the South and the tremendous prestige of having saved the Union. The new Party could and quickly did wrap itself in patriotic, nationalistic garb. Slavery had divided Southern and Western farmers; the war itself split them irrevocably afterward. After Appomattox, it became almost impossible for a wheat grower from Kansas to break bread with a cotton chopper from Tennessee.
In the patriotic, punitive fervor of a dying crusade, the Radical Republicans won tremendous victories in the elections of 1866. Passion, more than any understanding of or admiration for Republican imperatives, returned a horde of Johnson-and-Southern haters into Congress. In this election, no Southern state could vote, so the Congress remained purely regional rather than national. The great increase in the Radical strain of Republican gave Thaddeus Stevens, the House leader, and Charles Sumner, the Radical Senate chief, full control of Congress, and, they thought, the nation.
They would hardly have been human had they not wanted to consolidate it. The new order in the nation could not be preserved if the Southern delegations returned in force and resumed their old alliance with Democratic elements in the North and West. The Southern representatives had always led the battle against railroad and business subsidies, corporations, hard money, and almost everything the new class held dear. It was far from certain, in 1866, that America had completely deserted the plantation economy and strict construction of the Constitution to keep the nation in the mold of 1789, or that it would now direct its dominant energies and policy into economic development for the next hundred years. Rhetts and Robertses were reentering the Senate
, determined to halt the rush toward a mass economy and the middle-class ideal of a mass society, graduated only by wealth. Stevens and his cohorts writhed in hatred and anguish at the Presidential Reconstruction policy. As the House leader said, the readmitted Southern tier was sending a "solid rebel representation to Congress" where it would cast a "solid rebel vote." By "rebel" he meant it would oppose the new order of things. "They, with their kindred Copperheads [Northern Democrats] . . . would always elect the President and control Congress."
The fear of the industrial society seizing control had led the South to secession. Now, a fear of a return to 1856 drove the North into suppression.
Texas and the other states had played into Radical hands in many respects. They had elected aristocratic, ex-Confederate members of the old "slavocracy" governors and senators. There was a deep and lasting hatred for these people in the rest of the nation, more virulent than before the war. Millions in the North, who had lost kith and kin in the war, were antagonized at the election of a Confederate general as governor of the nation's largest state. Also, the early reemergence of Southern pride was fatal; it infuriated millions who still thought of the Civil War as some sort of moral crusade. The Texans did not come back to Washington humbly; they did not say mea culpa; they arrived demanding their Constitutional rights and generally raising hell about Yankee usurpation.
Most dangerous of all, men raised into a system of Negro bondage saw nothing wrong in putting the Negro back into some similar state. Slave codes, exact and detailed, had governed Negro life. All white Southerners believed that some sort of similar "workers' codes" were necessary for the reestablishment of orderly society. But here they allowed the Northern politicos to glorify sectional legislation by wrapping it in the hapless freedman's ragged, bloody shirt. In the very months that New Jersey, Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania rejected Negro suffrage at home, their spokesmen demanded it come about in the South. Gideon Welles summed up the demands of Stevens, New York's Roscoe Conkling, and other Radicals in a damning entry in his diary: "It is evident that intense partisanship instead of philanthropy is the root of the movement."
After Emancipation, the fact that the United States was a voting democracy was one of the Negro's greatest handicaps and became his lasting tragedy. He became a pawn of people who never really personally wanted to admit him into American society; he was "voted" for a hundred years by Parties whose philanthropy was mainly political, whether Republican or Democrat. An autocracy might have oppressed him worse, but it also might have found a solution without the public hypocrisy that all mass democracies were heir to.
The only way the Congressional chieftains saw of suppressing the revived "rebellion" the Presidential Reconstruction had allowed was to destroy the Southern social order. Stevens was more blunt than most Yankees, then or afterward: he "intended to revolutionize their feelings and principles. This may startle feeble minds and shake weak nerves. So do all great improvements."
The first great improvement was passage of the First Reconstruction Act, over Johnson's inevitable veto, on March 2, 1867. It was an act of Congressional expediency, which had both support and opposition among the ordinary people in the North. There was both confusion, caused by Radical exaggerations and propaganda, and genuine idealism in some popular support. The Negro did desperately need guidance and protection, though hardly in the way in which it was being rendered. Hardest to evaluate, but always present, was the now established Northern middle-class philosophy that a little humiliation was good for the Southern soul.
The Reconstruction Act did five things. It declared the new regimes in Texas and the old Confederacy illegal and unsatisfactory and abolished them. It divided the South into a conquered region of five military occupation districts. It required the former rebellious states to write new constitutions that guaranteed Negro suffrage and to elect brand-new governments on the basis of Negro voting. It made mandatory the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment before any state could be readmitted to the Union. It was also, by any then or later standard, unconstitutional. It was upheld.
To the protestations in the North that this imposition of military government, which was obviously designed to turn the South over to its Negro-Radical minorities, would humiliate the Southern social order, Stevens snapped: "Why not? Do they not deserve humiliation? If they do not, who does? What criminal, what felon deserves it more?"
The Southern states had long humiliated their slave class and denied it human status. On the other hand, only two states—Mississippi and South Carolina—had Negro majorities. Caucasians, whatever their biases, were the dominant race in every respect, and their dominance could only be set aside by outside force. From substituting concepts of morality and law for politics, some Americans were now prepared to replace politics with bayonets. Union bayonets were all-powerful, but the one thing they could not wreak was democracy.
The military commanders in the South were given power to remove or replace the civil authorities as they saw fit. Charles Griffin, still smoldering against Governor Throckmorton, conferred with General Phil Sheridan in New Orleans. Sheridan issued an order in the summer of 1867, branding the Texan as an "impediment to reconstruction." Throckmorton was summarily removed.
Neither the Mexican invasion of 1836 nor the bloody days of the Civil War marked the most disastrous period in Texas history: it began now.
Chapter 22
THE CARPETBAGGERS
There is no Andy Johnson "policy," no Throckmorton "Confederate record," no Jack Hamilton "rebel coalition," in the present programme. Let the people of Texas rejoice. "Come thou with us and we will do thee good."
HOUSTON Tri-Weekly Union, A RADICAL PAPER
We had hoped, and we believe the Republican party of the nation hoped, that with the completion of reconstruction the rights, interests, and wishes of the people would everywhere be respected. There were so many wicked and foolish things connected with the reconstruction of the Southern states, that the Republican party is already seriously injured thereby.
AUSTIN Daily Republican, A CONSERVATIVE ORGAN
THE events of 1867 in Texas convinced the vast majority of Texans that whatever face had been put on it, the real drive of the North in the War Between the States was for domination of the South. The evidence is overwhelming that most Texans had accepted the indivisibility of the Union and the fact of legal emancipation of the slaves, which were the primary and secondary issues of the war. Texans, with other Southerners, did not accept the idea of Negro equality, but that had never been a Union commitment. The fact that, in the same year that a majority of Northern states prohibited Negro voting by law, it was thrust by Federal fiat on the South was not lost on them. It was felt by virtually the whole population that the policy of the United States was to continue the prostration of the conquered states through easily manipulated Negro suffrage.
With the stubborn and honorable J. W. Throckmorton out of the way, General Charles Griffin proceeded to cleanse the state. Armed by continuing Reconstruction Acts from Congress, the U.S. Army carried out a purge of all state officials, which reached deep down to the county level. Everywhere, officeholders, even petty ones, with a Confederate past were dismissed. They were replaced with Union men. There were not nearly enough capable Unionists to go around, and many exceedingly dubious appointments were made.
In this period, there seemed to be an intensification of hatred toward former Confederates on the part of Northern officers. The entire military hierarchy—Grant, Sheridan, and Griffin—took views that can only be called tyrannical. The test or "ironclad" oath was extended to civil juries. Prospective jurors who could not swear that they had never voluntarily served or supported the Confederacy were barred. This act removed nine-tenths of the white population from jury duty, and its real effect was to destroy the civil courts.
Congress on March 23, 1867, extended the disenfranchisement of Southerners to include all persons who had ever held a state or Federal office before the Rebellion and later
supported the Confederacy. The U.S. Attorney General ruled liberally on this, presuming it applied only to major offices. Generals Griffin and Sheridan interpreted the edict much more strictly, with Grant's express approval. In Texas, any man who had ever been a mayor, school trustee, clerk, public weigher, or even a cemetery sexton was disenfranchised. The Grant-Sheridan view was later written into Congressional law.
Another military edict, which Congress validated in July, was to give registration boards complete authority to accept or reject applicants on the grounds of "loyalty," as each board saw fit. The boards were in the hands of Army officers or Union men. In a state which was only about one-quarter Negro, they registered 49,779 Negroes to 59,633 whites. A strong effort was made to place every freedman on the rolls. The most surprising aspect of this operation was that most Federal officials pretended to view it as essentially moral. The enormous social gulf between the auction block and the voting booth was ignored, or demolished with the argument that in no other way could past sins be rectified. Whatever truth or morality this argument had was utterly lost on Texans, because the process was so self-serving to the Republican hierarchy. The Army and the Freedmen's Bureau not only registered the Negro vote; both agencies also told the registrants incessantly who had freed the slaves and who now had presented them with the ballot. Understandably, despite an ineffective flowering of the Ku Klux Klan in Texas, they garnered the Negro vote.
During this period the President opposed the Congressional Reconstruction every step of the way. His vetoes were overridden. He was growing more lame-duck each day; the Southerner in the White House was without influence. The Congress deprived him of his Constitutional command of the Army by completely detailing, through law, the Army's operations in the South. The Senate prevented him from appointing any pro-Johnson men to his Administration. Finally, when Johnson tried to fight back, it moved to impeach him. No President was ever quite so thoroughly mauled.
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