American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  But as Lincoln’s funeral train wove its way through Manhattan and up along the Hudson and across New York State to Cleveland, to Indianapolis and Chicago, and then at last to Springfield, Americans were not asking these questions. They were simply pouring out their grief, none more so than Walt Whitman:

  When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d,

  And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,

  I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring….

  Here, coffin that slowly passes,

  I give you my sprig of lilac.

  CHAPTER 2

  The Reconstruction of Slavery

  DOWN BY THE BUSH spring on a Virginia plantation a young black woman jumped up from the ground, crying out, “Glory, glory, hallelujah to Jesus! I’s free! I’s free!” She looked around fearfully, then rolled on the ground and kissed it, calling out her love and thanks to “Masser Jesus.” A few minutes before, in the mansion, she had found the white family in tears over a rumor that Jefferson Davis had been captured. After getting permission for another black servant to wait on table while she fetched water from the bush spring, she had walked tight-lipped, then run all the way to the spring, flung herself to the ground, and indulged in a paroxysm of rejoicing. To her, freedom meant one overwhelming hope—that she could rejoin her husband and four children, sold several years earlier to a slave dealer.

  Other jubilees were more public. When reports of Lee’s surrender reached Athens, Georgia, blacks danced around a liberty pole in the center of town, until whites cut it down in the evening. In Charleston, several thousand black people paraded through the streets, while other thousands of blacks cheered. A mule pulled a cart carrying two women, beside whom a mock slave auctioneer shouted, “How much am I offered?” Then came sixty men tied together like a slave gang, followed by another cart carrying a black-draped coffin with letters proclaiming SLAVERY IS DEAD. Blacks from many trades—carpenters, tailors, butchers, masons, wheelwrights—along with Union soldiers and religious leaders, made up the long procession that slowly wound its way through town.

  Many years later, freed people would often recall “just like yistiday” the moment they heard that freedom had come. For most, however, the day of jubilee was more a day of confusion, worry, and uncertainty. How and where they heard the news of final Southern defeat, who told them and when, not only varied widely but carried omens of future frustration and tragedy.

  Often blacks heard the news from Union soldiers passing through the neighborhood. “We’s diggin’ potatoes,” remembered a Louisiana ex-slave, “when de Yankees come up with two big wagons and make us come out of de fields and free us. Dere wasn’t no cel’bration ’bout it. Massa say us can stay couple days till us ’cide what to do.” Sometimes a black who was “a good reader” would report the news from a newspaper. Most often slaves were assembled and told of their new freedom by their masters. Some masters in more remote areas waited weeks, even months, before informing their blacks, meantime using them to bring in the crops. Some planters accompanied their announcement with threats and warnings, demanding in some cases that the blacks stay and work and in others that they clear out at once. Occasionally a Union officer arrived to proclaim liberty; one such Yank had hardly left a Louisiana plantation when the planter’s wife emerged from the house to tell the newly freed blacks, “Ten years from now I’ll have you all back again.”

  Nor did the freed people always greet the news with jubilation. After the dashed hopes of recent years, they were above all wary and uncertain. Talking gravely among themselves in their quarters, they discussed rumors—that the federal government would not back up their newly found freedom, that the Yankees might sell them to Cuba in order to pay for war costs, that the whole thing was a giant piece of deception. “You’re joking me,” Tom Robinson told the master who said he was now a free man. He spoke with some slave neighbors to see if they were free too. “I just couldn’t take it all in. I couldn’t believe we was all free alike.” But above all the blacks felt confused and disoriented. “We jes’ sort of huddle ’round together like scared rabbits,” an Alabama woman remembered about hearing the news, “but after we knowed what he means, didn’ many of us go, ’cause we didn’ know where to of went.” Some blacks stayed on to help their former master or mistress, out of a feeling of compassion, affection, or obligation. Few exacted any real vengeance, but many were hostile. A story came down through generations of one black family about their great-grandmother Caddy, who had been badly treated.

  “When General Lee surrendered,” so the story went, “that meant that all the colored people were free! Caddy threw down that hoe, she marched herself up to the big house, then, she looked around and found the mistress. She went over to the mistress, she flipped up her dress and told the white woman to do something. She said it mean and ugly. This is what she said: Kiss my ass!”

  The attitudes and actions of the newly freed were closely affected by those of the planters, who were variously angry, heartsick, resigned, vengeful, helpless, and helpful. Many were already grieving over sons, plantations, and fortunes taken by war; losing their blacks was the final heartbreak. Some masters whipped and even shot and hanged blacks who asserted their freedom. “Papa Day,” a Texas planter, told his hands, after reading the official proclamation, that the government did not need to tell them they were free because they had been free all along, that they could leave or slay, but if they left, most “white folks would not treat them as well as he had.”

  Myrta Lockett Avary, daughter of a Virginia slaveholder, could never forget how her father had assembled his people one evening in the backyard. “You do not belong to me any more,” her father said in a trembling voice. “You are free. You have been like my own children. I have never felt that you were slaves. I have felt that you were charges put into my hands by God and that I had to render account to Him of how I raised you.” Looking out at a sea of uplifted black faces, illuminated by flaring pine torches, the master reminded them how he had fed them, clothed them, housed them, nursed them, taken care of their babies and laid away their dead. He wanted to keep them on by paying wages, but he hadn’t finished thinking things out. He wanted to know how they felt. “Ben! Dick! Moses! Abram! line up, everybody out there. As you pass this porch, tell me if you plan to stay….” All indicated they would remain. “Law, Marster!” said Uncle Andrew the patriarch, “I ain’ got nowhar tug go ef I was gwine!”

  Other slaveholders were glad to be rid of at least some of their slaves so that they need not take care of them; they would keep the good workers and turn out the very old and the very young, the ill and the inefficient— just like the Yankee capitalists!—to “root, pig, or die.”

  Many planters hardly knew how to liberate; many slaves hardly knew how to be liberated. Master and slave had lived in mutual dependency too long. Some planters almost felt relieved—they felt that their slaves had owned them—but others seemed to sicken and die. Mistresses in particular felt helpless when their servants disappeared. It was even harder for the blacks. “Folks dat ain’t never been free don’ rightly know de feel of bein’ free,” said James Lucas, a former slave of Jefferson Davis. “Dey don’t know de meanin’ of it….” An old slave rejected the idea of a wage: “Missis belonged to him, & he belonged to Missis.” Blacks knew how to work hard, said one of them, “but dey didn’t know nothing ’bout how to ’pend on demselves for de livin’.” Parke Johnston, a former slave in Virginia, recalled “how wild and upset and dreadful everything was in them times. It came so sudden on ’em they wasn’t prepared for it. Just think of whole droves of people, that had always been kept so close, and hardly ever left the plantation before, turned aloose all at once, with nothing in the world, but what they had on their backs, and often little enough of that; men, women and children that had left their homes when they found out they were free, walking along the road with no where to go.”

  Still, it was far more a time of hope than fear. “T
hat the day I shouted,” a former slave in Texas remembered. “Everybody went wild,” a Texas cowpuncher recalled. “We all felt like horses….WE was free. Just like that, we was free.”

  Out in Bexar County a cowpuncher heard blacks singing:

  Abe Lincoln freed the nigger

  With the gun and the trigger;

  And I ain’t goin’ to get whipped any more.

  I got my ticket,

  Leavin’ the thicket,

  And I’m a-headin’ for the Golden Shore!

  Bound for Freedom

  In the lush green spring of 1865 the Golden Shore seemed to stretch just across the horizon. An intoxicating sense of freedom filled the air. Defeated and despairing Southerners could at least be free of Northern assaults on their homeland and burnings of their cities. Whatever their continued suffering, black people still could hold high hopes for the future. Liberated from military duty and disciplines, soldiers and sailors were returning home by the tens of thousands. Onetime farm boys, having mastered the great engines of war, were drifting back to the simpler tasks and the old rhythms of the arcadian world they had known.

  Many Northerners felt free in a more positive sense. They had beaten the enemy on the transcendent moral issue of the time. They could face up to the burdens of freedom not only with enhanced military and economic power, but with a formidable array of leaders. Out of the conflicts of the 1850s and the crucible of war had emerged politicians, generals, agitators, intellectuals, journalists tested by adversity, hardened by experience, committed to making the system work for freedom—a system they now controlled.

  In the vanguard of the moral leadership of the nation stood Charles Sumner. After his heavy caning by Preston Brooks and his long, self-imposed exile, the Massachusetts senator had returned to Washington with the somewhat insecure status of minor martyr. But he soon reestablished his moral standing through his burning conviction about the responsibility lying on the Republican party, his absolute commitment to protecting the rights of freed people, and his uncompromisingly radical stand on the central issues. He was fifty-four years old at war’s end, and the mass of nut-brown hair that hung loosely over his massive forehead, shading his deep blue eyes, was turning an iron gray; but he was still a commanding presence in the Senate as he rose to his full six feet two, broad of chest and a bit heavy of paunch. Many senators loathed the man from Boston for his eternal pomposity, his endless hectoring, his thunderous self-righteousness. Many respected him for his intellectual grasp and political integrity—and for his uncanny capacity for being right several years ahead of others. No one could ignore him.

  At the opposite end of the long Capitol building, Thaddeus Stevens led the Radical Republicans in the House of Representatives with the same moral fervor as did Sumner in the Senate. Now seventy-three years old, the Pennsylvanian had climbed to the top after a long career in politics: anti-Mason state representative; two-term Whig member of Congress; an organizer of the Republican party; Republican member of the House of Representatives since 1858; and chairman of Ways and Means, the tax committee. Just as friends of Sumner speculated that the senator’s boyhood inability to meet the demands of an exacting father and unloving mother had left him eternally dissatisfied with his own—and his associates’—endeavors, so people wondered if Stevens’s clubfoot, his early poverty, and his desertion by a jobless and alcoholic father had produced a need both to compensate for a sense of inferiority and to chastise deserters, whether of the Union or of himself. Others had simpler explanations: both men found leadership against slavery morally fulfilling and politically rewarding.

  Other congressional leaders were often more effective than Stevens or Sumner in the give-and-take of legislative politics. Benjamin F. Wade, Massachusetts-born and -bred, had moved to Ohio at the age of twenty-one, joined the abolitionist ranks, and after thirty years in politics won his Senate seat in 1851. Now a veteran of the upper chamber, he was still a bit rough in manner and coarse in speech, but politicians liked him for his honesty and affability. Zachariah Chandler of Michigan was another New Englander who had moved west and prospered, in his case as a merchant banker and land speculator. A founder of the Republican party, he seemed to feel no strain between his conservative business interests and his close association with radical Republicanism. One of the ablest leaders of the moderate Republicans was Senator Lyman Trumbull, an old friend and foe of Lincoln in Illinois politics, firmly opposed both to slavery and to a radical reconstruction policy, and a powerful voice on both issues as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. To Trumbull’s right stood Orville H. Browning, the man who had succeeded to Stephen Douglas’s seat—a longtime critic of Lincoln, consistently opposed to abolitionism in the old days and now equally opposed to a strong reconstruction program.

  In the House, Stevens had some equally capable associates in such men as George W. Julian of Indiana—successively a Whig, Free-Soiler, and Republican, but always a firm egalitarian—and William D. Kelley of Philadelphia, a zealous humanitarian who would become an ardent protectionist. Julian was notable among these men for his firm belief in equality between the sexes. These men and the other Republican leaders quarreled with one another and sometimes despised one another but, in Martin Mantell’s words, collectively they “were able to define new basic policy positions that met the needs of rapidly changing times while maintaining the essential unity of their own party organization.” In the forcing house of Reconstruction the Republicans were shaping a party loyalty that would tilt the balance of American politics for decades to come.

  The great unknown in the existing balance, in the spring of 1865, was the new President, Andrew Johnson. A Tennesseean who won attention as the only Southern senator to speak out against secession, a slaveholder who boasted that he had never sold slaves but only bought them, the running mate of Lincoln in 1864 but lacking in ties to the Republican party, a believer in both equal rights and states’ rights and hence caught in the tension between them, Johnson had risen to fame outside of the social and political establishments—and he was proud of it. He boasted of his plebeian Carolina origins, though somewhat less of his father, a hotel porter who had died without reward after rescuing two boozing gentlemen from an icy stream. As an impoverished young man, hardly literate, Johnson had moved with his mother and stepfather, their scanty belongings in a two-wheeled cart, to Tennessee, where he had set up as a tailor and moved successfully into politics. Yet his mudsill origins seemed to oppress him, provoking a resentment in particular against the pontificators, like Sumner, who wore their learning on their sleeves. He had had a bad press, especially after he gave a rambling, drunken vice-presidential inaugural speech, in which he had scolded the attending Diplomatic Corps for its “fine feathers and gewgaws.” He had always been, on the national stage, a secondary, even shadowy figure. Now he was President.

  What kind of President? On the day after Lincoln’s assassination Wade, Chandler, Julian, and other Radical Republicans met in Washington to reassess the situation and plan strategy. They grieved over the loss of their friend the commander-in-chief, but they seemed to share a sense of relief. Lincoln had brilliantly held the Union together, even while emancipating the slaves, but he had seemed to many Radicals too conservative on the question of postwar Negro rights, too conciliatory toward the South. Johnson appeared to be a different breed: tough, uncompromising, a fiery foe of Southern “aristocrats,” a champion of the small white farmer in the South, a firm and even zealous war governor of Tennessee. Radicals visiting the new man in the White House came away vastly reassured. He seemed one of them. Even Sumner overrode his usual suspiciousness. Wade was almost euphoric.

  “Johnson, we have faith in you,” he greeted the President on one occasion. “By the gods, there will be no trouble now in running the government!” Responding in kind, Johnson said, “I hold that robbery is a crime; rape is a crime; murder is a crime; treason is a crime, and crime must be punished.”

  Prepared to mobilize behind a firm and c
omprehensive reconstruction policy was a relatively solid phalanx of Republican radicals and moderates. Often differing over means, they were fundamentally united over ends— to dissolve the old Confederate leadership, to provide national protection for the civil and political rights of freed people, to give the black people a chance to make out on their own. In seeking these goals, Radicals had extensive support among the electorate and powerful support from the intellectual leadership of the day—from thinkers and scholars like Ralph Waldo Emerson and John Lothrop Motley; from editors like Horace Greeley and Whitelaw Reid; from poets like Whittier, Whitman, and Lowell; from theologians and scientists; from leaders of the movement for women’s rights. The Radicals had also the advantage of long reflection over Reconstruction issues. From the start of the war they had been anticipating difficulties, analyzing ways and means, debating political strategies. They had collected extensive information about Southern conditions from newspaper reports, government investigations, military intelligence, the Freedmen’s Bureau, the resources of Northern universities.

  The Republican leaders had, it seemed, one other signal advantage in organizing Reconstruction: they could proceed without constitutional constraints to a degree not possible since the founding days. Not only did the Constitution of 1787 authorize and even require the federal government to guarantee basic rights of American citizens, but the Republicans, through their large majorities in Congress and most of the Northern state legislatures, were able to put through constitutional amendments as long as these changes satisfied both moderate and radical Republicans. The Republican Administration and the Republican Congress, in short, possessed an extraordinary battery of military, political (especially party), economic, intellectual, and constitutional resources to make a whole new beginning for democratic republicanism in the South. These advantages were, it is true, offset by grave institutional and intellectual weaknesses. But when Charles Sumner, the political curmudgeon incarnate, could leave the White House beaming over Johnson’s militant posture on Reconstruction, even the most pessimistic could indulge in high hopes for the future.