American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  Would black voting make the crucial difference? Of the three prongs of black advance in the South—schools, land, and the vote—the limited success of the first and the essential failure of the second left black suffrage as the great battlefield of Southern reform. Certainly Southern whites realized this and, as the Republican commitment faltered during the Grant Administration, they stepped up their efforts to thwart black voting. They used a battery of stratagems: opening polling places late or closing them early or changing their location; gerrymandering districts in order to neutralize the black vote; requiring the payment of a poll tax to vote; “losing” or disregarding black ballots; counting Democratic ballots more than once; making local offices appointive rather than elective; plying blacks with liquor. These devices had long been used against white Americans, and by no means did all Southern whites use them now, but fraud and trickery were especially effective against inexperienced and unlettered blacks.

  When nonviolent methods failed, many Southern whites turned to other weapons against voting: intimidation, harassment, and terror. Mobs drove blacks away from the polls. Whites blocked polling entrances or crowded around ballot boxes so blacks could not vote. Rowdies with guns or whips followed black voters away from the polling place. When a group of black voters in Gibson County, Tennessee, returned the fire of a band of masked men, the authorities put the blacks in jail, from which an armed mob took them by force to a nearby riverbank and shot them down. Fifty-three defendants were arrested by federal authorities and tried, none convicted.

  Some of this violence erupted spontaneously as young firebrands, emboldened by liquor, rode into polling areas with their guns blazing. But as the stakes of voting rose, terrorists organized themselves. Most notable was the Ku Klux Klan, with its white robes and hoods, sheeted horses, and its weird hierarchies of wizards, genii, dragons, hydras, ghouls, and cyclopes. Proclaiming its devotion to “Chivalry, Humanity, Mercy, and Patriotism,” the Klan proposed to protect the “weak, the innocent, and the defenseless”—and the “Constitution of the United States.” The Klan had allies in the Knights of the White Camelia, the White Brotherhood, and other secret societies.

  Incensed by mob violence, the Republicans in Washington tried to counter it with legislation. The Enforcement Act of May 1870 outlawed the use of force, bribery, or intimidation that hindered the right to vote because of race in state and local elections. Two more enforcement acts during the next twelve months extended and tightened enforcement machinery, and in April 1871 Congress in effect outlawed the Klan and similar groups. But actual enforcement in the thousands of far-flung polling places required an enormous number of marshals and soldiers. As army garrisons in the South thinned out, enforcement appropriations dwindled, and the number of both prosecutions by white prosecutors and convictions by white juries dropped, black voting was more and more choked off.

  After his election to a second term Grant tried vigorously though spasmodically to support black rights for the sake of both Republican principle and Republican victories. In a final effort, the Republicans were able to push through the Civil Rights Act of 1875, designed to guarantee equal rights for blacks in public places, but the act was weak in coverage and enforcement, and later would be struck down by the Supreme Court.

  By the mid-seventies Republicanism, Reconstruction, and reform were all running out of steam. Southern Democrats were extending their grip over political machinery; the Republican leadership was shaken by an economic panic in 1873, and the party lost badly in the 1874 midterm elections. The coup de grace for Reconstruction came after Rutherford Hayes’s razor-thin electoral-college victory in 1876 over Samuel J. Tilden. Awarded the office as a result of Republican control over three Southern states where voting returns were in doubt, and as a result too of a Republican majority on the Electoral Commission, Hayes bolstered his position by offering assurances about future treatment of the South. While these were in the soft political currency of veiled promises and delphic utterances, the currency was hard enough for the Democrats—and for Hayes as well. Within two months of his inauguration, he ordered the last federal troops out of the South and turned over political control of Louisiana, South Carolina, and Florida to the Southern Democracy.

  …

  And what of the objects of this long political struggle—the black people of the South? The vast majority were in the same socioeconomic situation as ten years before, at the end of the war. They had gained certain personal liberties, such as the right to marry, and a modicum of legal and civil and political rights, including the right to vote in certain areas; but their everyday lot was much the same as before. Most still lacked land, property, money, capital; they were still dependent on the planters, sometimes the same old “massa.” It was not a black man but a prominent white Georgian who said of the freedman late in 1865: “The negro’s first want is, not the ballot, but a chance to live,—yes, sir, a chance to live. Why, he can’t even live without the consent of the white man! He has no land; he can make no crops except the white man gives him a chance. He hasn’t any timber; he can’t get a stick of wood without leave from a white man. We crowd him into the fewest possible employments, and then he can scarcely get work anywhere but in the rice-fields and cotton plantations of a white man who has owned him and given up slavery only at the point of the bayonet.…What sort of freedom is that?”

  Many a freedman had exchanged bondage for a kind of bargaining relationship with employers, but his bargaining position was woefully weak. If he held out for better terms, he could be evicted; if he left, he might be denied work elsewhere and arrested for vagrancy; if he struck, he had no unions or money to sustain him. So the “bargains” were usually one-sided; contracts sometimes literally required “perfect obedience” from employees. Some blacks had had the worst of both worlds—they had left the security of old age and sickness in bondage, under masters who cared for them because they were valuable property, for a strange “free-market” world in which they developed new dependencies on old masters.

  Could Reconstruction have turned out differently? Many have concluded that the impotence of the blacks was too deeply rooted, the white intransigence too powerful, the institutions of change too faulty, and the human mind too limited to begin to meet the requirements of a genuine Reconstruction. Yet the human mind had already conducted a stupendous social revolution with the blacks. For a hundred years and more, Southern planters, assisted by slave recruiters in Africa, masters of slaving ships, various middlemen, auctioneers, and drivers, had been uprooting blacks by the hundreds of thousands out of far-off tribal civilizations, bringing most of them safely across broad expanses of water, establishing them in a new and very different culture, and converting them into productive and profit-creating slaves. Somehow the human mind seemed wholly capable of malign “social engineering,” incapable of benign.

  Yet there were some Americans who did understand the kind of broad social planning and governmental action that was needed to reconstruct genuine democracy in the South and truly to liberate the freed people. Wendell Phillips understood the depth of the problem, the need for a “social revolution.” He said: “You must plant at the South the elements which make a different society. You cannot enact four millions of slaves, ignorant, down-trodden, and despised, into personal equals of the old leaders of the South.” He wanted to “give the negroes land, ballot and education and to hold the arm of the Federal government over the whole Southern Territory until these seeds have begun to bear fruit beyond any possibility of blighting.” We must see to it, said Senator Henry Wilson, that “the man made free by the Constitution is a freeman indeed; that he can go where he pleases, work when and for whom he pleases; that he can sue and be sued; that he can lease and buy and sell and own property, real and personal; that he can go into the schools and educate himself and his children.…” Douglass and Stevens and Sumner took similar positions.

  These men were not typical of Republicans or even of Radical Republicans, but many other radi
cals and moderates recognized that the freed people needed an array of economic, political, social, and legal supports, and that these were interrelated. Congressman George Hoar lamented that blacks had been given universal suffrage without universal education. Some radicals believed that voting was the black’s first need and others that land or sustenance came first, but most recognized that no single “solution” was adequate. Antislavery men, said Phillips, “will believe the negro safe when we see him with 40 acres under his feet, a schoolhouse behind him, a ballot in his right hand, the sceptre of the Federal Government over his head, and no State Government to interfere with him, until more than one-half of the white men of the Southern States are in their graves.”

  Did the fault then lie with the political system? The checks and balances among President, Senate, and House; the curious nomination and election devices that brought in an “anti-nigger” Vice-President to succeed the Great Emancipator; the clumsy, fragmented federal system; the need for both houses to muster two-thirds votes on crucial issues; the underlying thinness and instability in the popular support for Reconstruction—all these testified to the inability of the national government to develop firm, comprehensive, consistent, and durable programs of reconstruction. On the other hand, the Republicans did get rid of Johnson; they enjoyed two-thirds majorities in Congress at intervals; they won popular support for Reconstruction programs in every national election for a decade; and federalism was largely suspended during Reconstruction. Never was the “system” so adaptable to high purposes as during Reconstruction.

  The critical failure of Reconstruction probably lay far more in the realm of leadership—especially that of opinion-makers. Editors, ministers, and others preached liberty and equality without always comprehending the full dimensions of these values and the means necessary—in the South of the 1870s—to accomplish such ends. The radicals “seemed to have little conception,” according to Stampp, “of what might be called the sociology of freedom, the ease with which mere laws can be flouted when they alone support an economically dependent class, especially a minority group against whom is directed an intense racial prejudice.” Reconstruction could have succeeded only through use of a strategy employed in a number of successful postwar reconstructions of a comprehensive nature—a strategy of combining ideological, economic, political, educational, and institutional forces in such a firm and coordinated way as truly to transform the social environment in which Southerners, both black and white, were trying to remake their lives after the Civil War. And such a strategy, it should be noted, would have imposed heavy intellectual, economic, and psychological burdens on the North as well.

  Not only would such a strategy have called for rare political leadership—especially for a leader, in William Gillette’s words, able to “fashion a means and then persevere in it, bending men to his purpose by vigorous initiative, skillful influence, and masterful policy.” Even more it called for a rare kind of intellectual leadership—political thinkers who could translate the component elements of values such as liberty and equality into policy priorities and operational guidelines. But aside from a few radicals such as Phillips, most of the liberals and many of the radicals had a stunted view of the necessary role of public authority in achieving libertarian and egalitarian purposes. The Nation, the most influential liberal weekly in the postwar period, under Edwin L. Godkin shrank from using the only means—government—that could have marshaled the resources necessary for genuine reconstruction. “To Govern Well,” The Nation proclaimed, “Govern Little.” A decisive number of otherwise liberal-minded and generously inclined intellectual leaders held similar views. Thus, leaders like Phillips and like Sumner, who said that “whatever you enact for Human Rights is Constitutional,” were left politically isolated. There were many reasons for the failure of Reconstruction, but the decisive one—because it occurred in people’s conceptualizing and analyzing processes and not merely in ineluctable social and economic circumstances—took place in the liberal mind. Most of the liberals were effective transactional leaders, or brokers; few displayed transforming leadership.

  That liberal mind seemed to have closed itself off even to the results of practical experimentation. During the war, General Sherman had set aside for freedmen several hundred thousand acres on the Sea Islands south of Charleston and on the abandoned rice lands inland for thirty miles along the coast. Each black family was to receive its forty acres until Congress should rule on their final disposition. Federal officials helped settle 40,000 blacks on these lands. When the whole enterprise was terminated by Johnson’s pardon and amnesty program, and land turned back to former owners, the black farmers were incredulous. Some had to be driven off their land by force. The program had lasted long enough, however, to demonstrate that freed people could make a success of independent farming, and that “forty acres and a mule” could serve as the foundation of Reconstruction. But the lesson seemed lost on Northerners who shuddered at the thought of “land confiscation.”

  Thus the great majority of black people were left in a condition of dependency, a decade after war’s end, that was not decisively different, in terms of everyday existence, from their prewar status. They were still landless farm laborers, lacking schooling, the suffrage, and self-respect. They achieved certain civil and legal rights, but their expectations had been greatly raised too, so the Golden Shore for many seemed more distant than ever. Said a black woman: “De slaves, where I lived, knowed after de war dat they had abundance of dat somethin’ called freedom, what they could not eat, wear, and sleep in. Yes, sir, they soon found out dat freedom ain’t nothin’, ’less you is got somethin’ to live on and a place to call home. Dis livin’ on liberty is lak young folks livin’ on love after they gits married. It just don’t work.”

  Or as an Alabama freedman said more tersely when asked what price tag he bore—and perhaps with two meanings of the word in mind:

  “I’se free. Ain’t wuf nuffin.”

  PART II

  The Business of Democracy

  CHAPTER 3

  The Forces of Production

  HE MUST STUDY POLITICS and war, John Adams had said, so that his sons might have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain. But it did not quite work out that way. A son, John Quincy, took up not philosophy but diplomacy, politics, and the presidency. A grandson, Charles Francis Adams, embraced not painting and porcelain but law, diplomacy, and Republicanism. And a great-grandson, Charles Francis Jr., took up not poetry and music but war, law, business—and railroads.

  “I endeavored to strike out a new path,” Charles Francis Adams, Jr., said later, “and fastened myself, not, as Mr. Emerson recommends, to a star but to the locomotive-engine.”

  A locomotive engine! How could this young Adams, inheriting the Adams disdain for money-grubbing, choose business over public service and the professions? Because he was restless in that tradition; because as a young Harvard graduate he felt hopelessly adrift and socially and politically inept, felt that he made the worst kind of “Adams impression”—of hauteur and gracelessness—even when he wanted to be liked; because railroads to him meant not only investments but the kind of railroad regulation that would occupy him during the best years of his life. Above all because, by the 1850s and 1860s, business and industry, with their constant innovations, hair-raising speculation, huge losses and dizzying profits, were coming into their own as respectable occupations for the privileged—and even more, as a form of intellectual adventure and personal liberation.

  The world into which Adams graduated from Harvard in the 1850s, and the world to which he returned after war service in the 1860s, seemed to beckon the free-enterprising spirit. The smell of individual opportunity, the sense of boundless economic possibilities, the idea of unlimited progress seemed to pervade the very air men breathed. The well-established mid-cent
ury businessmen had grown up in an earlier era of Jeffersonian and Jacksonian individualism. Many had imbibed doctrines of personal and political liberty, individual enterprise, laissez-faire, limited government. The roaring prosperity of the flush 1840s and 1850s, the exploding technology, the cornucopia of farm and factory goods had whetted their appetites for more prosperity and profits.

  Never mind that most Jeffersonians had been as suspicious of big business as of big government, that the federal government in fact built roads, made grants for canals and railroads, improved rivers and harbors, passed tariffs to help American exporters and shippers. No matter that some state governments launched almost an orgy of public enterprise, subsidizing banks and even establishing them, building and chartering turnpikes, canals, and railroads, providing bounties to farmers who grew certain crops, experimenting with numerous social reforms. The ethic of individual responsibility, of personal progress, of economic self-fulfillment, prevailed. Had not Emerson himself preached a need for the self-reliant man of affairs?