American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  The old tradition that presidential candidates remain mute Grant found wholly to his liking; he remembered the summer and fall of 1868 as “the most quiet, pleasant time” since the start of the war. He let the Republican party platform speak for him; but on the paramount question of black suffrage that platform spoke with a delicately forked tongue: “the guaranty by Congress of equal suffrage to all loyal men at the South was demanded by every consideration of public safety, of gratitude, and of justice, and must be maintained; while the question of justice in all the loyal States properly belongs to the people of those States.” In short, black suffrage for the South, but not necessarily for the North. The platform did uphold Reconstruction policy on “equal civil and political rights to all” and railed against Johnson for his “treachery” and “usurpation.”

  For President the Democrats nominated Horatio Seymour, a former governor of New York long active in national politics, and as his running mate Frank P. Blair, Jr., of Missouri, a former Union general and Republican party organizer who had turned violently against the Radicals. Soon the parties were locked in combat, the Democrats labeling Grant a drunkard, anti-Semite, military bungler, and potential despot, and the Republicans pillorying their foes as madmen and traitors and bigots. Black voting became a key issue as the Democrats taxed their opponents with favoring Negro equality and pursuing a balance-of-power role for blacks in the South. The Democracy (as Democrats called themselves) encountered such hostility in the North that Seymour and Blair offered to step down and be replaced—and leading Democrats seriously considered the idea in the final weeks of the campaign. But it was too late to switch the donkey’s riders.

  Grant swept the .electoral college, 214 to 80, winning all the Northern states save for New York, New Jersey, and Oregon. The popular vote was closer: 3 million to 2.7 million, a majority of 52.7 percent for Grant. Although the Democrats achieved a net gain of eleven seats in the House, the Republicans retained their two-thirds supremacy in that chamber. The North remained loyal to the memory of Lincoln. The Republican party, hardly more than a dozen years old, had already developed a remarkably stable vote of about 55 percent above the Mason-Dixon Line. The Southern and Border states, which divided between the two sides, were more checkered and volatile. Overall, the Republicans had clearly established themselves as the majority party, just as an earlier Republican party had done. But that had been a different brand of republicanism.

  “I’se Free. Ain’t Wuf Nuffin”

  Some Radicals now were more optimistic than ever. Grant’s election, they felt, provided a supreme and perhaps final opportunity to reconstruct the South. Now the Republicans had their own men in the White House; they still controlled both houses of Congress; they had established their supremacy over the Supreme Court; they had considerable influence over the federal military and civilian bureaucracy in the South. They still had the power to discipline the Southern states, by admitting them to the Union or expelling them. The Republicans had pushed through the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments. They still possessed the ablest, most experienced political leadership in the nation. Stevens had died during the campaign, but Sumner had been handsomely reelected in Massachusetts. “So at last I have conquered; after a life of struggle,” the senator said.

  Other Radicals were less sanguine. They knew that far more than Andrew Johnson had thwarted Reconstruction. The national commitment to black equality was weak, the mechanisms of government faulty, and even with the best of intentions and machinery, the connecting line between a decision in Washington and an actual outcome affecting a black family in Virginia or Mississippi was long and fragile. Time and again, voters had opposed black wrongs without favoring black rights. Before the war, they had fought the extension of slavery but not slavery where it existed. During the war, they had come to approve emancipation only after Lincoln issued his proclamation. After the war, in a number of state elections—especially those of 1867—Northerners had shown that they favored black suffrage in the South but not at home.

  Spurred by effective leaders, Americans were moving toward racial justice, but the journey was agonizingly slow and meandering. “It took America three-quarters of a century of agitation and four years of war to learn the meaning of the word ‘Liberty,’ ” the American Freedman editorialized. “God grant to teach us by easier lessons the meaning of the words ‘equal rights.’ ” How quickly and firmly Americans moved ahead on black rights could turn significantly on continuing moral and political leadership.

  The crucial issue after Grant’s election was the right of blacks to vote. Republican leaders in Congress quickly pushed ahead with the Fifteenth Amendment, which declared in its final form that the “right of the citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” It was a noble sentiment that had emerged out of a set of highly mixed motives. Democrats charged, with some reason, that the majority party was far less interested in legalizing the freedman’s vote in the South than in winning the black vote in the North. But the Republican leadership, knowing that countless whites in the North opposed black voting there, were responding to the demands of morality as well as practicality. Senator Henry Wilson reminded his colleagues that the “whole struggle in this country to give equal rights and equal privileges to all citizens of the United States has been an unpopular one; that we have been forced to struggle against passions and prejudices engendered by generations of wrong and oppression.” He estimated that that struggle had cost his party a quarter of a million votes. Another Republican senator, however, contended that in the long run adherence to “equality of rights among men” had been not a source of party weakness but of its strength and power. Most Republicans, the historian Michael Les Benedict has concluded, did not face a hard choice between expediency and morality, “for to a large extent the political fortunes of the Republican party were best served by fulfilling its liberal ideological commitments.”

  If political morality in the long run meant political practicality, the Fifteenth Amendment nevertheless bore all the markings of compromise. To gain the two-thirds support constitutionally required in each chamber, the sponsors were compelled to jettison clauses that would have outlawed property qualifications and literacy tests. The amendment provided only that Congress and the states could not deny the vote, rather than requiring them to take positive action to secure black suffrage; nor was there any provision against denial of vote by mobs or other private groups. And of course the amendment did not provide for female voting—and so the National Woman Suffrage Association opposed it.

  Still, radicals in and out of Congress were elated when the Fifteenth cleared Congress, elated even more when the measure became part of the Constitution in March 1870, after Republican state parties helped drive it through the required number of legislatures. Some of the old-time abolitionists were euphoric too. Their prestige and influence now at a peak, they basked in the adulation they received in the press, their mail, and the hundreds of appearances they made every year in cities and towns throughout the country. Wendell Phillips was especially impressive on the lecture circuit. “Impracticable? Fanatical?” an Iowa editor wrote after hearing him. “Why, he is one of the most entirely plain, common-sense, practical and practicable men we ever heard.” Henry Raymond’s moderate New York Times had to admit that what the radicals “propose today may be law tomorrow.” To the Democratic New York World the radicals were a marching army: “Mr. Weed lags in the rear; Mr. Raymond is only six months behind Mr. Greeley, and Mr. Greeley is only six weeks behind Thad Stevens, and Thad Stevens is only six days behind Wendell Phillips, and Wendell Phillips is not more than six inches from the tail and the shining pitchfork of the master of them all.”

  So euphoric were some abolitionists about the Fifteenth Amendment that they saw their task as done. The Fifteenth, resolved the American Anti-Slavery Society, was the “capstone and completion of our movement; the
fulfillment of our pledge to the Negro race; since it secures to them equal political rights with the white race, or, if any single right be still doubtful, places them in such circumstances that they can easily achieve it.” Other radicals were more cautious, even cynical. Lydia Maria Child feared that the Fifteenth might “yet be so evaded, by some contrivance, that the colored population will in reality have no civil rights allowed them.” Phillips converted his Anti-Slavery Standard into The Standard, dedicated to racial equality, labor reform, temperance, and women’s rights.

  The legal right of blacks to vote soon produced a phenomenon in Southern politics—black legislators, judges, superintendents of education, lieutenant governors and other state officials, members of Congress, and even two United States senators. These, however, made up only a fraction of Southern officeholders: in none of the legislatures did blacks hold a majority, except briefly in South Carolina’s lower house. Usually black leaders shared power with “carpetbaggers”—white Northerners who came south and became active in politics as Republicans—and “scalawags”—white Southerners who cooperated with Republicans and blacks. While many black leaders were men of “ability and integrity,” in Kenneth Stampp’s view, the whites and blacks together comprised a mixed lot of the corrupt and the incorruptible, moderate and extreme, opportunistic and principled, competent and ignorant. The quality of state government under such leadership also was mixed, but on the whole probably no worse than that of many state and local governments of the time. The state governments in the South bore unusually heavy burdens, moreover—demoralization and poverty in the wake of a devastating war, the need to build or rebuild public services throughout the region, the corrupting influence of contractors, speculators, and promoters seeking subsidies, grants, contracts, franchises, and land.

  Far more important than the reality of black-and-white rule in the South was the perverted image of it refracted through the distorted lenses of Southern eyes. It was not easy for the white leadership to see newly freed men, some of them illiterate, aggressive, and loutish, occupy positions of prestige and power; and it was perhaps inevitable that they would caricature the new rulers to the world. A picture emerged of insolent boors indulging in legislative license, lording it over downtrodden whites, looting the public treasury, bankrupting the state, threatening white traditions, womanhood, and purity. As sober an observer as Lord Bryce, writing almost a generation later, reported that such a “Saturnalia of robbery and jobbery has seldom been seen in any civilized country”; since “the legislatures were reckless and corrupt, the judges for the most part subservient, the Federal military officers bound to support what purported to be the constitutional authorities of the State, Congress distant and little inclined to listen to the complaints of those whom it distrusted as rebels, greed was unchecked and roguery unabashed.”

  The worst fear of the old white leadership—that black-and-white rule would produce a social revolution—turned out to be the least warranted of all. The mixed rule of blacks, scalawags, and carpetbaggers produced a few symbolic and actual changes: rhetoric drawn directly from the Declaration of Independence proclaiming liberty, “equality of all persons before the law,” various civil and political rights; a mild effort in two or three states to integrate certain educational institutions; a feeble effort at land reform. Constitutions were made somewhat more democratic, legislative apportionment less discriminatory, more offices elective; “rights of women were enlarged, tax systems were made more equitable, penal codes were reformed, and the number of crimes punishable by death was reduced,” in Stampp’s summation. The constitution of South Carolina—the state that had served as the South’s political and ideological heartland, and the state that now paradoxically had elevated the most blacks to leadership positions—was converted almost into a model state charter, with provisions for manhood suffrage, public education, extension of women’s rights, and even the state’s first divorce law. Shades of John C. Calhoun!

  But what the black-and-white leadership failed to do was of far more profound consequence than what it did. Both radicals and moderates understood that education was a fundamental need for Southern blacks, but the obstacles were formidable and progress slow. Even the best educational system could hardly have compensated for decades of illiteracy and ignorance. “The children,” James McPherson noted, “came from a cultural environment almost entirely devoid of intellectual stimulus. Many of them had never heard of the alphabet, geography, or arithmetic when they first came to school. Few of them knew their right hand from their left, or could tell the date of their birth. Most of them realized only vaguely that there was a world outside their own plantation or town.” In the early years, teachers sponsored by “Freedmen’s Aid” and missionary groups met the challenge, often finding to their surprise that black children had a passion to learn, could be taught to read as quickly as white children, and might be found laboriously teaching their own parents the alphabet and the multiplication table.

  These private educational efforts were never adequate, however, to teach more than a fraction of the South’s black children. The question was whether the reconstructed black-and-white state governments would take over the task in a comprehensive way, and here they failed. The difficulties were at least as great as ever: inadequate facilities, insufficient money, lack of teachers, inadequate student motivation, discipline problems (black teachers tended to be the harsher disciplinarians). But the biggest hurdle was the constant, pervasive, and continuing hostility of many Southern whites to schooling for blacks. “I have seen many an absurdity in my lifetime,” said a Louisiana legislator on observing black pupils for the first time, “but this is the climax of absurdities.” A Southern white woman warned a teacher that “you might as well try to teach your horse or mule to read, as to teach these niggers. They can’t learn.”

  Behind these white Southern attitudes toward schooling for black children lay a host of fears. One was their old worry that blacks would be educated above their station and out of the labor supply. “To talk about educating this drudge,” opined the Paducah (Kentucky) Herald, “is to talk without thinking. Either to ‘educate,’ or to teach him merely to read and write, is to ruin him as a laborer. Thousands of them have already been ruined by it.” Even more pervasive was the white fear of integration, although most black leaders made it clear that their main interest was education, whether segregated or not. Southern fears often took the form of harassing and humiliating teachers or, more ingeniously, depriving them of white housing so that some teachers lived with blacks—and hence could be arrested as vagrants. Defending the arrest of a freedmen’s teacher, the mayor of Enterprise, Mississippi, said that the teacher had been “living on terms of equality with negroes, living in their houses, boarding with them, and at one time gave a party at which there were no persons present (except himself) but negroes, all of which are offenses against the laws of the state and declared acts of vagrancy.” Black-and-white governments could not overcome such deep-seated attitudes.

  To many blacks, even more important than education was land—“forty acres and a mule.” During the war, when workers on a South Carolina plantation had rejected a wage offer from their master, one of them had said, “I mean to own my own manhood, and I’m goin’ on to my own land, just as soon as when I git dis crop in.…” Declared a black preacher in Florida to a group of field hands: “It’s de white man’s turn ter labor now. He ain’t got nothin’ lef’ but his lan’, an’ de lan’ won’t be his’n long, fur de Guverment is gwine ter gie ter ev’ry Nigger forty acres of lan’ an’ a mule.” Black hopes for their own plots had dwindled sharply after the war, when Johnson’s amnesty proclamation restored property as well as civil rights to most former rebels who would take an oath of allegiance. His expectations dashed, a Virginia black said now that he would ask for only a single acre of land—“ef you make it de acre dat Marsa’s house sets on.”

  Black hopes for land soared again after the congressional Republicans took control of
Reconstruction in the late 1860s, only to collapse when Republican moderates—and even some radicals—refused to support a program of land confiscation. Black hopes rose still again when black-and-white regimes took over state governments; some freedmen heard rumors that they need only go to the polls and vote and they would return home with a mule and a deed to a forty-acre lot. But, curiously, “radical” rule in no state produced systematic effort at land redistribution. Some delegates to the Louisiana constitutional convention proposed that purchases of more than 150 acres be prohibited when planters sold their estates, and the South Carolina convention authorized the creation of a commission to buy land for sale to blacks, but little came of these efforts. One reason was clear: Southern whites who had resisted black voting and black education would have reacted with even greater fury to as radical a program as land redistribution, with all its implications for white pride, white property— and the white labor supply.

  Black leaders themselves were wary of the freedmen’s lust for “forty acres and a mule.” In part, this caution may have been due to the class divisions between the black Southern masses and their leaders, many of whom had been artisans or ministers, had been free before the war, and had never experienced plantation life and closeness to the soil. Some of these leaders were, indeed, virtually middle-class in their attitudes toward property, frugality, “negative” liberty, and hard work, and in their fear that radical blacks might infuriate white power elites by talking “confiscation.” Such leaders preferred to bargain with the white power structure rather than threaten its control over land and other property. Prizing liberal values of individual liberty, the need for schooling, and above all the right to vote, they played down the economic and social needs of the blacks. And they based their whole strategy on the suffrage, arguing that all the other rights that blacks claimed—land, education, homes—were dependent on their using the potential power inherent in their right to vote.