The war may have been won, Lincoln said from the balcony of the executive mansion, but the devastated South would need reconstruction. The consequences of emancipation would have to be met head-on. That was the speech that Booth, too, had heard.
“The whole subject of what is called Reconstruction is beset with difficulty,” Gideon Welles had worried a year earlier. In Syracuse, New York, with delegates coming from as far away as North and South Carolina and Louisiana, a national black convention called for universal suffrage and equality before the law. But Republicans were divided. After the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified in December 1865, William Lloyd Garrison stopped the presses of The Liberator. His object—emancipation—was attained, and he was far less sure about universal suffrage than he had been about abolition. Not so Senator Charles Sumner. “Liberty has been won,” he remarked. “The battle for Equality is still pending.” And Frederick Douglass said that without suffrage, “we should have slavery back again, in spirit if not in form.”
Republicans and Democrats were at the same time trying to figure out where Lincoln’s thinking had been headed before his death. Recollecting the Hampton Roads conference, Admiral Porter claimed that the president possessed “the most liberal views toward the rebels”; Sherman too, in his memoirs, remembered that the president said that as soon as the rebels surrendered, “they would be at once guaranteed all their rights as citizens of a common country.” But all that was recalled after the fact. Similarly, Lincoln’s last speech was and has been parsed over and over. Nonetheless, when he spoke from the balcony of the White House on April 11 to the large crowd of black and white listeners, he declared that “we, the loyal people” were not of one mind about what he called Reconstruction, or the “re-inauguration of the national authority.” It could be “fraught with great difficulty.” He repeated that he was open to more plans than his own. And as for the recent controversy over Louisiana (where only 10 percent of eligible voters had elected the new state government), Lincoln admitted he would not at all mind enfranchising black men who were “very intelligent” or who had served “our cause as soldiers.” It was an astonishing event: as the historian Eric Foner noted, no other U.S. president had ever even hinted at the possibility of black suffrage.
NO ONE REALLY knew what Lincoln had intended or where his Reconstruction policies might have led, especially in peacetime. Lincoln was a brilliant man and master politician comfortable with restraint as well as risk and capable of change and reflection.
At fifty-six years old, Andrew Johnson seemed ready for the difficulties that lay ahead when Chief Justice Salmon Chase administered the oath of office just a few hours after Lincoln had been pronounced dead on that doleful and rainy morning of April 15. The poor white man from North Carolina who had walked all the way to Tennessee to build a life there, the man who seemed to frown perpetually and whom Washington snobs had thought a vulgar drunk ever since his unfortunate behavior at Lincoln’s second inauguration, the man whom, it was rumored, Lincoln had not much liked, never mind taken into his confidence—Johnson nonetheless inspired measured optimism. He kept his poise. He grasped the reins of power reassuringly and without hesitation. He appeared disciplined and calm. George Templeton Strong, who once had considered Johnson ungenteel and low, remarked that the new president seemed “dignified, urbane, and self-possessed.” The reporter Noah Brooks was relieved not just by Johnson’s demeanor but also by the way his administration seamlessly followed Lincoln’s. “It was a remarkable illustration,” Brooks said, “of the elasticity and steadiness of our form of government that its machinery moved on without a jar, without tumult, when the head was suddenly stricken down.”
In the wake of the country’s terrible loss, Johnson promised continuity. He would keep the members of Lincoln’s cabinet as his own, at least at first. He reassured Republicans, particularly Radicals, that he was “clearly” of the opinion “that those who are good enough to fight for the Government are good enough to vote for it; and that a black heart is a more serious defect in an American citizen than a black face.” Senator Ben Wade greeted him with a hearty “We have faith in you,” and Representative George W. Julian of Indiana announced that Johnson “would prove a godsend to the country.” He would not coddle former Confederates. Treason is a crime and will be punished, Johnson had said, although he had been referring to assassination conspirators. Still, former Confederates were being put on notice, it seemed.
So when Sherman offered General Johnston terms of surrender that far exceeded Sherman’s authority, President Johnson acted quickly to reject them. Sherman had offered Johnston a general amnesty, recognition of existing Confederate states, and a restoration of property and political rights. Better than anyone, Sherman knew what devastation he had caused, what wasteland he had helped to create, and he naively hoped these magnanimous terms would bring not just an end to the war but would guarantee law and order. What he feared most, he said, were roaming guerrilla bands who would never capitulate.
Johnson not only cast aside Sherman’s so-called armistice but also authorized the pursuit of Jefferson Davis, assuming that Davis, among others, had been involved in the assassination. Of course Johnson and Davis had been bitter enemies, which may also account for his offer of an enormous sum, $100,000 reward, for his capture. Yet to many Republicans there seemed no reason to question his resolve to punish the South or at least hold it far more accountable than he would in the months to come.
ON A SUNNY, warm Wednesday, May 23, Washington decked itself out for a two-day victory parade during which General Meade’s Army of the Potomac and Sherman’s Army of the Tennessee and Army of Georgia would march before the crowds, reportedly 75,000 strong, that lined Pennsylvania Avenue. Though the public buildings were still wreathed in mourning ribbons of black crepe, the flags no longer flew at half-mast, and there was plenty of bunting and bold-colored streamers to welcome home the heroes of the republic, the gallant defenders of the nation. There were people perched on the roof of one building or another. Landlords rented out windows that overlooked Pennsylvania Avenue, which had been cleaned by the fire department, but so many visitors descended on Washington that some of them had to sleep in horsecars or on park benches. Fortunately, the weather was mild, and although it had rained for two days earlier in the week, the streets were relatively dry.
The commissioner of public buildings placed a gleaming gilded eagle over his front door, then climbed the stairs inside the Capitol dome to get a better view. Men and women wore their Sunday best, and many of them waved small flags. Young girls carried roses and others threw flowers from the tops of the houses and cheered although, technically, the war had not yet ended, even if most of the seaports were already open to commerce.
This grand review was the frenzy of jubilation that followed the frenzy of mourning. Flanked by generals and members of his cabinet, President Andrew Johnson was on the covered stand located in front of the executive mansion. As the armies passed it, they lowered their regimental flags—many of them riddled with bullet holes—and President Andrew Johnson, ramrod straight, saluted them or shook the outstretched hands of the victors. On Wednesday came the Army of the Potomac, all of it, the horses clattering, bugles blowing, the cavalry and the mounted artillery and the engineering brigades. Walt Whitman was there, watching and taking notes, and on the second day he spotted the self-possessed Sherman and his proud western army.
Sherman passed by rapidly, ignoring the shouting crowd, his face twitching. Behind him was a tight column. “The glittering muskets looked like a solid mass of steel,” he recalled, “moving with the regularity of a pendulum.” Near Sherman rode the one-armed major general Oliver Otis Howard, wounded at Fair Oaks and the new head of the Freedmen’s Bureau. When a young girl offered Howard a wreath, he couldn’t manage it with only one arm, so he just smiled and rode on.
Clover Hooper had a seat on the congressional platform, roofed over to keep the spectators from the sun. It was the most perfect day, she said; t
here were Zouaves, brightly dressed in their baggy scarlet trousers and dark blue jackets, red fezzes on their heads, and the Irish brigade wore green. Most of the officers in the parade carried roses, and many of the horses had wreaths around their necks. Onlookers could see the artillery, ambulances, and army wagons. Mother Bickerdyke, who had nursed the western fighters, rode sidesaddle with the Fifteenth Corps. All the noise spooked General Custer’s stallion, which dashed up Pennsylvania Avenue at top speed, and though Custer lost his hat in the wind, the blond soldier, his troops swathed in scarlet scarves, saluted the president with his hand touching the place where his hat would have been.
The two-day parade was like inauguration day, General Grant later reminisced, recalling the tumult and the waving flags—and the doorsteps and sidewalks “crowded with colored people and poor whites who did not succeed in securing better quarters from which to view the grand armies.” Missing was Philip Sheridan, who didn’t ride in the review, much to his disappointment and that of the crowd; he would be en route to Texas to make sure that General Edmund Kirby Smith’s Confederate army surrendered, which they had yet to do. And spectators saw no black troops, for they too remained in the field—although the 22nd U.S. Colored Infantry had marched in Lincoln’s funeral procession just weeks before. It was said that they were being sent, along with Sheridan, to the Southwest. Instead, there were black laborers—black men without threatening muskets—and a dozen or so black women in bandannas along with a few children, a goat, and a couple of gamecocks.
Missing too was the commander in chief, who for four years had steered the war as best he could, each year deepening the lines on his bony face and showing sorrow in his melancholy eyes, the man who promised justice and mercy and also the avenging sword, if need be, and who proved himself as good as his promise. Abraham Lincoln should have been in the reviewing stand. “All felt this,” Gideon Welles said—yet it could almost seem as if he were. Clover Hooper said, “It was a strange feeling to be so intensely happy and triumphant, and yet to feel like crying.” Amid the patriotism and cheer, amid the rugged display of nationalism and wreaths and fluttering banners, amid the clatter of horses’ hooves and the blare of “John Brown’s Body,” amid all of it there had to be a sadness, a loneliness, an anxiety about the future and the haunting memory of dead comrades and bloody bodies left to rot atop one another on a faceless field: “The martyred heroes of Malvern Hill,” wrote the transplanted westerner Bret Harte, “Of Gettysburg and Chancellorsville / The men whose wasted figures fill / The patriot graves of the nation.”
And then there were the crossed or overlapping purposes for which the war had been fought—the preservation of the Union, the freeing of the slaves—that were somehow waved away for two days of celebration and forgetfulness, the flip side of mourning and dread.
There were so many unknowns. One of the largest was Reconstruction.
“Did I ever think to live to see this day,” said a Southern refugee in despair and anger after she learned that Joe Johnston had surrendered. “After all the misery and anguish of the four past years—,” she cried. “Think of all our sacrifices—of broken hearts, and desolated homes—or our noble, glorious dead—, and say for what? Reconstruction! how the very word galls.”
PART THREE
{ 1865–1876 }
(17)
BUT HALF ACCOMPLISHED
Rufus Saxton was solid; he followed orders, he fulfilled pledges, he defended with dignity whatever and whomever he believed to be right, regardless of color. And if the journalist Whitelaw Reid patronizingly called him a dull but well-meaning functionary (“not very profound in seeing the right but energetic in doing it when seen”), Saxton had been charged with a seemingly impossible function: the supervision—no, the care—of the 20,000 or so former slaves who had remained in the South Carolina Sea Islands after the arrival of the Union fleet in late 1861. He performed his job well—so well, that he would anger his superiors.
A Massachusetts native, Saxton was the son of a radical Unitarian who had very much wanted his sons to attend the experimental school at Brook Farm. Only one of them had, and it hadn’t been Rufus. He’d preferred the rigors of West Point to the radicalism of West Roxbury. After graduating in 1849, he commanded an expedition to survey a route through the Rocky Mountains for the Northern Pacific Railroad, taught military tactics at West Point, headed the drawing and engraving division of the U.S. Coast Survey, and patented a self-registering thermostat for deep-sea soundings, which earned him an honorary degree from Amherst College. During the war, he served on the staffs of Generals Lyon, McClellan, and Thomas W. Sherman as chief quartermaster. In 1862 he defended the strategic and now symbolic Harpers Ferry against Stonewall Jackson, for which he later received the Medal of Honor. Stanton and Lincoln then wanted him to leave the field to become military governor in the Department of the South, where he would supervise the former slaves to whom he would issue rations and clothes and supplies—and from whose population he would recruit and train soldiers.
Short, compactly built, with deep-set eyes and curly black side whiskers (“what ladies would call a handsome man,” Reid said), General Saxton had likely earned the appointment because he believed that slavery was wrong and that not only would black men fight to end it, they would fight well. Headquartered in Beaufort, South Carolina, in late 1862, he recruited and trained black soldiers, and he organized the freedmen who were too old or who were unable to serve, setting them to work on abandoned plantations to harvest the cotton—about $2 million worth—which he turned over to the U.S. Treasury. In a way, he was hoping to create another Brook Farm—but in the South, among blacks, so that freedmen could achieve economic independence and prove to former Confederates at home and racists everywhere that black men and women were competent, ready to fight, ready to farm, desirous of freedom, and fully deserving of it.
Saxton visited General William Tecumseh Sherman in Savannah not long after the city’s surrender in late December 1864. He was surprised by what he found. Charities were being distributed to “rank secesh women, in silks, while poor whites & destitute negroes are turned away & told to go to work,” said Captain Samuel Willard Saxton, his brother’s aide-de-camp. And with new fortunes to be made in cotton, opportunistic Northerners were coming to do just that—with the help of former Confederate planters. “The heads of that army don’t care much about humanitarian labors,” noted Willard Saxton.
Rufus Saxton was more encouraged when the crusty secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, went to Savannah and the Sea Islands the next month. Stanton said he wanted General Saxton to remain where he was. As a matter of fact, he’d brought papers confirming Saxton’s promotion to brevet major general, which meant, in addition to the military honor, that Washington (Lincoln’s Washington) was committed to continuing Saxton’s work with former slaves in South Carolina. The two men, along with General Sherman, also talked with twenty black clergymen and local leaders, and on January 16, 1865—three months before Appomattox—Sherman issued his famous Special Field Order No. 15, which gave land confiscated by the Union to the freedmen.
Land: Special Field Order No. 15 designated a specific belt of abandoned land, extending along the coast from Charleston to Jacksonville, on which freedmen could settle. The head of each black family would obtain not more than “forty acres of land and a mule.” Sherman wanted to help black families become independent, though not necessarily for altruistic reasons; the army had over 80,000 black refugees to house and feed, and the sooner they could take care of themselves, the better. Whatever the motive, the order implied a radical land redistribution, which upended the propertied class system in the South and gave the gift of home and property to those who had been denied both. And so, as in the case of emancipation, a military strategy was forcing a political and social sea change—but only up to a point. Special Field Order No. 15 could not stipulate that these black families would actually own the land they were given.
Appointed Inspector of Settlements and Pl
antations in South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, General Saxton faced the giant task of resettling the freedmen and then protecting their claim to the land, pending the passage of a bill in Congress to that effect. Saxton didn’t relish the assignment. He had been asked to enforce an order that might not be enforceable, and later he remembered arguing with Stanton, telling him that “former promises which I had made to the freedmen with reference to the occupancy of land had been broken, and I feared that in the enforcement of that order they would be disappointed—again. I begged the Secretary of War, therefore, to relieve me from the duty of carrying it out. He ordered me, with great emphasis, to enforce it to its fullest extent, and I promised him that I would do so.”
Misgivings aside, Saxton intended to fulfill Sherman’s promise. He wished, he said, “every colored man, every head of a family, to acquire a freehold, a little place he can call his own,” to work his own farm with dignity—and to save money in locally established banks. By June, General Saxton had resettled 40,000 black men and women on about 400,000 acres of land, presumably issuing what Sherman had called “possessory” titles to that, since no one yet knew who legally owned it. The resolution of that question—who had legal title to the land—would become a core feature of Reconstruction.
Despite his promotion, Saxton may have secretly hankered after a different appointment: that of heading the newly formed Freedmen’s Bureau, organized shortly before Lincoln’s death. For one year, the Bureau was to oversee all aspects of the freedmen’s lives—everything from aid to education to the adjudication of disputes, which was what Saxton had been doing. And though the Bureau had been organized without reference to Sherman’s Special Field Order No. 15, its mandate also included the apportionment of confiscated land into forty-acre plots, which were to be leased to freedmen and refugees and then sold to them, assuming that the government had title to the land, a detail that still remained unclear.
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