Ecstatic Nation

by Brenda Wineapple

  Saxton was offered another position but said he “would not touch [it] with a thousand foot pole.” Rumors flew: General Howard had advised Saxton to resign because Saxton’s radical views stood in the way of Johnson’s—and Howard’s—Reconstruction policies. (“O that we had Ben Butler at the head of the Bureau,” cried Saxton’s brother.) Saxton was offered a promotion. He refused. He said he preferred “loss of rank to loss of honor.”

  On January 22, 1866, Saxton was relieved of his duties in the Sea Islands. “It is a triumph of the rebels, which they have long labored to attain,” said his brother, “—one of the ‘compromises’ which have been the bane of the nation for years past.” Before he left, he restored no land to former rebels; after he left, he learned that the freedmen had been turned out of their houses, and in a matter of months 430,104 acres of land previously under the jurisdiction of the Freedmen’s Bureau had been surrendered to pardoned owners. Trescot had worked hard to block any validation of the Sherman land titles and was largely successful. Ultimately, freedmen holding titles received from the government nothing more than the right to rent or purchase twenty-acre plots on government-held land. “All subsequent attempts to define the personal rights of the negro to the land were fated to come to naught,” wrote a commissioner after the fact, “by the final policy of the Government, on the return of the Southern people to their old possessions.”

  Collecting their pennies to buy Saxton a farewell gift, the freedmen of the Sea Islands protested his dismissal. Had he been sacked, they wanted to know, “because he delivered the poor that cried, the fatherless, and him that had none to help him? Was it because the blessing of the poor, him that was ready to perish, came upon this Christian soldier, and he caused the widow’s heart to sing for joy? Was it because he was eyes to the blind and feet to the lame?” They respected him, his patience, his solicitude, and his perseverance in “securing to every man the benefit of law and order; our schools, printing-press, churches, our bank at Beaufort, with a deposit today of $240,000, and his impartial decisions on the labor questions, vs., a fair day’s work for a fair day’s labor, stand as constant memorials before us of his actual worth, as a civil and military ruler.”

  But Saxton was flayed in the press—the Northern press. He and his administration were lambasted by two of Howard’s subordinates and Johnson allies, Generals Fullerton and James B. Steedman, the latter “a rough character with no sympathy for the negroes,” as Howard later recalled. Because neither man agreed with Saxton or cared for the Freedmen’s Bureau, Johnson had sent them south on a fact-finding mission during which they had learned that blacks vigorously supported the Bureau. “If the Freedman Bureau was removed, a colored man would have better sense than to speak a word in behalf of the colored man’s rights, for fear of his life,” said a black leader in Wilmington, North Carolina. That didn’t matter to Steedman or Fullerton. They alleged widespread corruption and malfeasance among Bureau commissioners from Virginia to Texas (though they did not visit Kentucky, Tennessee, or Arkansas and did not report on the successes in Alabama). And as for General Saxton, they were damning. “The result of Gen. Saxton’s administration, at any rate, based as it was on such a mistaken policy, was meretricious in the extreme,” concluded the Johnson-sympathizing New York Times, “and well nigh disastrous to the interests of both races.”

  His dander up, Saxton fought back publicly—a way to secure equality for the freedmen by other means. Fullerton and Steedman had spent a mere twenty-four hours in the Sea Islands, Saxton charged; they interviewed mainly half-reconstructed rebels and in their final report made no mention of the regiments of black soldiers he had organized and who demonstrated that former slaves could and would fight; no mention of the cotton he had raised to finance his administration; no mention of the revenue he had sent to the Treasury; no mention of the savings bank he had established where the freedmen deposited their earnings; no mention of the schools he had started. And as he would explain to the joint Committee on Reconstruction, there was no real reformation among Southerners—“that, in their own words, they are overpowered, not conquered, and that they regard their treason as a virtue, and loyalty as dishonorable.”

  It was too late. Replacing Saxton was the bushy-haired general Robert Kingston Scott, formerly a feverish gold seeker, both in Mexico and in South America, who had prospected with little success. Scott had then moved on to speculation in real estate, and when the war began, he raised a regiment. Like Howard, he rode with Sherman through Georgia and the Carolinas, leaving destruction and a displaced refugee population in his path. Now, these underfed refugees—the lands once promised them repossessed—were piling up their household goods in heaps and tying their smaller goods in blankets. They were often homeless, their cows and goats wandering the countryside and stalked by guerrillas with blackened faces wearing Union uniforms.

  Wendell Phillips was angry. The South was victorious: we may have conquered Southern armies, he said, but we have not conquered Southern values, Southern prejudice, or Southern determination. The freedman was not free. “After earning a dollar, may he keep it and invest it in land? That is for the white man to say. May he testify in court? Perhaps. May he sit in the jury box? It is not certain. May he marry with the common solemnity of that sacrament? Well, we do not know. May he learn to read a Bible? Well, we’ll see. May he hear the dirge of his own children? Perhaps. May he go to the ballot box? Certainly not.”

  ANDREW JOHNSON HAD also asked General Grant to gather information about conditions in the South during a hasty five-day trip in December 1865, just before the Thirty-ninth Congress was to reconvene. When Grant returned to Washington—after one day in Raleigh, two in Charleston, and a day each in Savannah and Augusta—he submitted a bland, brief report. He advised against removing the military presence from the region although he did think that keeping black troops was inflammatory—and demoralizing (to the whites). And he steered clear of the controversies surrounding the Freedmen’s Bureau except to say that giving confiscated land to former slaves had been a mistake, which is what men of property and standing in Charleston and Savannah and Augusta had told him.

  The French correspondent Georges Clemenceau called Grant’s milquetoast report nothing more than a prop in Johnson’s theater of restoration.

  It was a prop that Johnson sorely needed. He had already asked Major General Carl Schurz to travel to the former Confederacy to investigate the results of Reconstruction. When Johnson read Schurz’s eloquent—and utterly scathing—report, Johnson supposedly quipped that his only error as president so far had been sending Schurz to the South. Grant’s report was supposed to be the antidote to that of Schurz, but the damage had already been done.

  Carl Schurz was a powerful antislavery leader determined to accomplish in America what he’d failed to do in Germany: fight successfully for democracy. Born in 1829 near Cologne, the brilliant émigré arrived in the United States from Paris, where he briefly worked as a correspondent after the failure of the German revolution and his near capture in 1848 by the Prussians against whom he’d been fighting. He temporarily returned to Germany, though, to mastermind the successful escape of a former teacher from prison, whom he spirited to England. He then sailed to America, married a wealthy Hamburg-born wife, and, after learning to speak and write flawless English, settled in Wisconsin in 1852, where he was admitted to the bar. Five years later, he was an antislavery candidate for lieutenant governor fluent in two languages, which made him an asset to German Americans and their spokesman. Losing by a tiny margin (200 votes), he remained active in politics, chaired the Wisconsin delegation to the Republican national convention in 1860, and so impressed Lincoln that he appointed Schurz minister to Spain. More important, the thin, wiry, intense Schurz became Lincoln’s confidant.

  After Fort Sumter, Schurz resigned his diplomatic post in order to join the Union army. He fought at the Second Battle of Bull Run, at Chancellorsville, and at Gettysburg, earning an uncertain reputation in the field but
all the while believing the war must be fought for abolition as well as for the Union. Devastated by Lincoln’s assassination, he held out hope for Johnson’s administration, but his report on the conditions of the South was not what the new president wanted to hear.

  Having traveled extensively throughout South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, and the Gulf, Schurz produced a report of forty-six eloquent, well-reasoned, and well-corroborated arguments that thoroughly condemned Johnson’s Reconstruction policies. He told of the unreconstructed Southerner who had apprehensively waited for reprisals but who had grown strong and defiant when none came. He told of the countless Southerners who still believed in the right of secession despite their swearing of loyalty oaths; treason did not seem odious to these men, who possessed no real national allegiance. He told how Yankees and, in particular, Union soldiers were still considered enemies, how acknowledged Southern Unionists lived a precarious life, how bands of highwaymen ruled the roads, and how cotton, horse, and cattle stealing went unchecked. Large numbers of freedmen still worked on plantations but were not remunerated; they were subject to unfair contracts, poor working conditions, and physical force. The white planters thought, in any case, that the system of free labor would never work—one Georgia planter, to prove his case, said that his black employee had actually refused to submit to a whipping. Other freedmen flocked to cities and seaports, where they were penniless, unemployed, and reviled. Codes and ordinances deprived the black population of the freedom of movement, the freedom to carry arms, the freedom to testify against accusers, the freedom to open a business, and in one strange case the ability to buy or sell goods without written consent. In more instances than one knew, black people were hanged, drowned, stabbed, or shot dead, though in South Carolina, at least, General Saxton had stood up to the planters who perpetrated violence against the freedmen. Non-slaveholding and landless whites were bitter and vindictive against the freedman and -woman, and if only certain people acted out their hatred by killing and maiming, those who did not kill or maim refused to stop those who did.

  Still, Schurz was not unsympathetic to the white people he found in the South, a people stripped of means of self-support—particularly those who lost their plantations or whose farms were heavily mortgaged. He was aware of the many people, now insolvent, who had indirectly depended on these farms and plantations to keep their own businesses afloat since so much of the South’s commerce was agriculture-based. He was aware too that the returning Confederate soldier did not find, as did his counterpart in the North, jobs or prosperity. He saw a carnival of ruin: homesteads destroyed, blackened chimneys aloft in open fields, farms devastated, families dressed in rags, boys and girls shoeless, entire communities exhausted. And these white communities were understandably suspicious of the change from slave to free labor.

  Schurz then asked what he considered an eminently practical question: “If, as long as the change from slavery to free labor is known to the Southern people only by its destructive results, these people must be expected to throw obstacles in its way, would it not seem necessary that the movement of social ‘reconstruction’ be kept in the right channel by the hand of the power which originated the change, until that change can have disclosed some of its beneficial effects?”

  Johnson answered no. Give the South back to the Southerners, he said.

  As for the white population’s complaints against the freedmen, Schurz laboriously countered such grievances about their refusal to work, their vagrancy, insolence, and their inability to honor contracts. Schurz paternalistically noted, with as much wonder as condescension, “Centuries of slavery have not been sufficient to make them the enemies of the white race. If in the future a feeling of mutual hostility should develop itself between the races, it will probably not be the fault of those who have shown such an inexhaustible patience under the most adverse and trying circumstances.”

  Schurz’s conclusions—the ones that most angered President Johnson—were simple: “unadulterated free labor cannot be had at present, unless the national government holds its protective and controlling hand over it.” And unadulterated free labor was essential to dignity and a new social order. This new order was one of human rights—which was to say suffrage: “A voter is a man of influence,” the freedom-loving Schurz ardently declared; “small as that influence may be in the single individual, it becomes larger when that individual belongs to a numerous class of voters who are ready to make common cause with him for the protection of his rights.”

  Andrew Johnson refused to publish the report, most of which appeared in the Boston Daily Advertiser anyway and so pleased Charles Sumner that he arranged to have it appended to the same congressional document as Grant’s report. For Schurz confirmed the worst fears of Sumner and those Republicans growing disenchanted, if not outright hostile, to what one of them called Johnson’s proslavery policies. “I did think it was good policy to place some one living in a Southern state—who had been true—on the ticket and favored Johnson,” said one early backer, “—for which the Lord forgive me.” Said another, “A disastrous eclipse will come over affairs, & . . . he will bring the nation to shame.”

  And so Congress reconvened, Carl Schurz reminding its members a revolution was at hand. He may have lost the one in Germany, but his adopted country was the land of possibility, founded in the name of liberty. Yet he wasn’t naive. Change would not come easily. “The power which originated the revolution,” he said, “is expected to turn over its whole future development to another power which from the beginning was hostile to it and has never yet entered into its spirit, leaving the class in whose favor it was made completely without power to protect itself and to take an influential part in that development.”

  Power and powerlessness: the North needed to maintain and sustain the victory hard won on a four-year battlefield. “Nothing renders society more restless,” Schurz warned, “than a social revolution but half accomplished.”

  (18)

  AMPHITHEATRUM JOHNSONIANUM

  Muggy weather in New Orleans in summer isn’t particularly unusual, but the thickness in the air this morning comes from tension. It’s Monday, July 30, 1866. Twenty-six members of a newly called Constitutional Convention will be meeting at the Mechanics’ Institute at noon. They will talk about a new state constitution, one that might include black male suffrage. That makes people uneasy. Three days ago, at an interracial rally of some 1,500 people, speakers were calling for black male suffrage, which the conservative press reported as a call for revolution. It said that the dentist Anthony Dostie, a Radical Republican originally from Chicago, was telling the crowd to cover the streets in blood.

  Something had to be done. And it had to be done that day.

  THE CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION slated for July 30 was actually a reconvening of the Unionist one that had adjourned two years before, in 1864. That seemed extraordinary, especially to the New Orleans Democrats. But since a loophole in the state constitution allowed the convention’s president to recall it, the convention would technically be legal. And Rufus K. Howell, a Louisiana Supreme Court associate justice and convention president pro tem, had issued the call because Louisiana governor J. Madison Wells very much wanted him to do just that.

  Of course, the convention would need a quorum, which no one expected there would be—why would conservatives come to the convention, especially since they suspected its motives? To them, the convention was being recalled mainly to give black men the vote and to abolish the Black Codes: ratifying the Thirteenth Amendment for the purpose of reentering the Union had been one thing, they’d conceded, but enfranchising black men would be quite another. So the mayor of New Orleans, John T. Monroe, who had been elected while an unpardoned rebel (Johnson had quickly pardoned him), promised to break up the convention and arrest the delegates and charge them with subversion. What’s more, Mayor Monroe had the support of the commanding officer in the Gulf, Major General Philip Sheridan, who regarded the planners of the convention as “
political agitators and revolutionary men.”

  On July 30, while Sheridan was in Texas, around nine o’clock in the morning, one hundred fifty freedmen, many of them war veterans, marched up Burgundy Street and across Canal Street to the Mechanics’ Institute on Dryades. Waving the Stars and Stripes, they pounded drums, and someone played the fife. Several of them had brought canes or walking sticks, and some were said to have pistols. On the side of the streets, police and spectators, perhaps 1,500 in number, were milling. The police, who ordinarily carried just nightsticks, were heavily armed.

  With Sheridan away, General Absalom Baird was in charge. An elegant West Pointer from Pennsylvania, before the war Baird had been a teacher at his alma mater, where one of his favorite students had been the painter James McNeill Whistler. A veteran of the First Battle of Bull Run, the peninsular campaign, and Chickamauga, Baird had also fought at Chattanooga and in Sherman’s Atlanta campaign. Worried, he’d heard from Mayor Monroe that the convention was going to disturb the peace, and though he didn’t think the army should be directly involved, he had wired Stanton to ask for instructions. Stanton didn’t answer. The only man to reply to Baird’s request for instructions was Lieutenant Governor Albert Voorhies, a former Confederate official, who said that though no arrests should be made, General Baird should place troops on Dryades Street, outside the Mechanics’ Institute, about an hour before the convention. Baird later claimed that he was told the convention would start at six in the evening—not at noon—so when the shooting started, he had no troops nearby. They were about three miles away.

  Maybe Baird had been intentionally misinformed. It’s hard to know. Information about what happened that day was contradictory. Twenty-six delegates did assemble at noon. The Reverend Dr. Horton opened the meeting with a prayer, but since there wasn’t a quorum, the delegates decided to recess, hoping more of them would show up before long. Then they heard the popping sound of gunfire from outside.