During the two terms of radical Republican governor Reuben Fenton, from 1864 to 1868, the state of New York passed the most extensive series of reform laws in the North. Many of these laws addressed problems highlighted by the draft riots, according to Republicans, who also sought to dismantle the Democratic machine. Empowering the new Board of Health with control over liquor licenses and Sunday closings, Republicans took aim at the grocery-groggeries that made up the Democrats' grassroots network, as they had with the Liquor Act of 1857.
New York City's volunteer "fire laddies" also constituted a reservoir of Democratic loyalists, and they were placed under the grip of a centralized, professional fire department. At the hearings in Albany, police commissioner Thomas Acton undercut possible opposition from the old volunteer department by making clear that he had the names of firemen who had taken the side of the rioters in July 1863.30
While Governor Fenton and Horace Greeley backed an effort to repeal the state's $250 property requirement that kept most blacks from voting, the essentially conservative Citizens' Association had no desire to go that far in reconstructing New York's political culture; indeed, many of its members hoped to restrict the suffrage of whites to protect middle- and upper-class "taxpayers" from the masses of workingmen and the Democratic leaders who bought their votes with wasteful municipal construction projects and government jobs. Reacting against the antebellum mass culture that was a powerful ingredient of the draft riots, the association added to the growing class tensions in the city.
A strike by the city's street cleaners early in 1865 signaled that a backlash against the association had begun. Over the next decade, while the city's labor movement insisted on workers rights, the Citizens' Association countered with its own philosophy of taxpayers' privileges. In harmony with E. L. God-kin's influential magazine, the Nation, Republican reformers attacked Democratic corruption and proposed efficient government in the hands of elite, disinterested men who were supposedly above the fray of partisan politics. The emergence of this brand of reform, whose leaders called themselves the "best men," would have a decisive impact on the fate of both African Americans and working-class whites in the postwar period.31
On March 6, 1865, a huge procession in New York City celebrated Lincoln's second inaugural, and a few weeks later news of Union victories poured into the North. Sherman had reached North Carolina in late March, Grant had stormed the Petersburg lines, and Lee was forced to abandon Richmond, which fell on April 3.32
At his home in Virginia, within earshot of the Petersburg battlefield, Edmund Ruffin noted that a messenger had arrived with "the worst of news. Lee's army has been defeated, & Richmond evacuated!"
Ruffin braced himself for the arrival of "the vindictive & atrocious enemy," and for "robbery and destitution." Moreover, he believed his notoriety made him a particular target. "I have long been marked, & anxiously wished for, as a victim of malignant hatred & vengeance—& if captured, & recognized as the long-continued enemy and opposer of Yankee oppression, & the man who fired the first gun against Fort Sumter, I should be subjected to treatment compared to which the infliction of immediate death, by shot or halter, would be merciful."33
On April 7, 1865, Grant called on Lee to surrender, and the message was carried through the lines by Colonel Robert Nugent of the Irish Sixty-ninth Regiment. Nugent had ended his term as acting assistant provost marshal general a few months after the draft riots and soon left the army. He was recommissioned a year later and served through the Petersburg campaign, in which the regiment was again decimated.
The Irish Sixty-ninth, along with other Irish regiments, had played a conspicuous role on the front lines throughout the four-year struggle.34Nugent wrote of the Sixty-ninth that "the same old spirit prevailed that characterized the Irish soldier the world over—full of fun, full of frolic and full of fight . . . It was ever cheerful and brave, ready to respond to the bugle call." This "noble brigade," he wrote, deserved "a place upon the enduring escutcheon of fame along with the Light Brigade at Balaklava."35
With Lee's surrender at Appomattox on April 9, the war came to an end. The following day, Maria Daly wrote in her diary: "Last night at midnight, we heard an extra called. The Judge rushed to the door, 'Surrender of Lee's army, ten cents and no mistake,' said the boy all in one breath (a true young American). It was Palm Sunday, and hosanna may we well cry! Glory be to God on high; the rebellion is ended!"36
The war was over, but amid the celebration, northern leaders set a tone that would have grave consequences for black Americans. Like Grant, many northerners of various political stripes were determined to treat the defeated enemy generously. Indeed, Greeley headlined his editorial on April 10 "MAGNANIMITY IN TRIUMPH" and urged that all the rebels, including those deemed leaders, be granted clemency. Maria Daly noted approvingly that Grant had allowed Confederate officers and privates "to go to their homes on their parole, not to be disturbed by the U.S. government so long as they keep the peace and behave as loyal citizens. I hope the animosity that has so long reigned will now pass away." A friend told her the North "must give a general amnesty—even let Jeff Davis go. If we execute him, we should make him a martyr. Let him go and he is only a miserable failure whom no one will care for, from whom we shall have nothing to fear."37
Only five days later, Maria Daly wrote: "What dreadful news! President Lincoln assassinated; Secretary Seward's throat cut . . . Poor Lincoln . . . God save us all. What may not a day bring forth!"38 On April 14, the president was watching a play at Ford's Theater in Washington when he was shot in the back of the head by John Wilkes Booth, a well-known actor enraged by Lincoln's elevation of blacks to freedom and citizenship.
With nine other conspirators, Booth had set out to decapitate the federal government, but the planned attacks on Vice President Andrew Johnson and other officials went awry. Several people in Seward's house were slashed when they tried to apprehend his attacker, but none was killed and Seward survived. The president died on April 15, Good Friday. Booth fled to Virginia and died in a shoot-out with federal troops who surrounded the barn where he was hiding. Four of Booth's accomplices were hanged, four were jailed, and one was acquitted. For the moment, the conciliatory northern mood had been dealt a heavy blow.39
Without any evidence, Jefferson Davis was charged as an accomplice in the assassination and captured in Georgia by federal cavalrymen, who put him in irons and deposited him in Fort Monroe at the tip of Virginia's York-town Peninsula. However, federal prosecutors soon had trouble building a case against Davis, and the government considered releasing him but dreaded the political fallout. Davis became a political prisoner, trapped in jail without the prospect of a day in court.40
In the coming months, Greeley continued to argue for "Universal Amnesty" for the rebels even when, as a Tribune pamphlet put it, "the assassination of Mr. Lincoln had wrought the North into a frenzy of grief and wrath which would hardly tolerate suggestions of forbearance and mercy." Greeley believed that punishing the rebels would not advance the rights of blacks in the South, but rather perpetuate a vicious cycle by giving whites a justification for oppressing them. However, Greeley did not explain how giving ex-Confederates political power would protect blacks. Indeed, there could be no explanation. Despite his best intentions, Greeley's proposals were a recipe for white supremacy in the South.41
In May 1865, the Army of the Potomac paraded in front of the Capitol in Washington, with Robert Nugent leading what was left of the Irish Brigade, its flags in tatters. The brigade returned to New York early in the summer, some seven hundred men, for a final parade. They were soon followed by the similarly diminished Irish Legion. "The men looked strong and hardy," one observer recalled, "their faces, bronzed by the exposure of years, were wreathed with smiles and bestowed with tears as cheer upon cheer rent the air."42
While the North rejoiced, the defeated Confederacy slid into despair. Edmund FLuffin sat down to write the defiant last entry in his diary on June 17, 1865: "I hereby declare my un
mitigated hatred to Yankee rule . . . &to the Yankee race. Would that I could impress these sentiments, in their full force, on every living southerner, & bequeath them to every one yet to be born! May such sentiments be held universally in the outraged & downtrodden South, though in silence & in stillness, until the now far distant day shall arrive for just retribution for Yankee usurpation, oppression, & atrocious outrages—& for deliverance & vengeance for the now ruined, subjugated, &enslaved Southern States!"
Ironically, the visionary secessionist regarded the sacking and burning of northern cities as the South's most potent weapon but was most outraged by attacks on southern civilians—by "the invading forces who perpetrated, & their leaders & higher authorities who encouraged, directed, or permitted . . . robbery, rapine & destruction, & house-burning, all committed contrary to the laws of war on non-combatant residents, & still worse on aged men &helpless women!"
Ruffin had been struggling with the religious taboo against suicide but gradually, through close scrutiny of the Bible, had overcome his qualms. After writing these final words and leaving instructions for his family, Ruffin, still seated, put the muzzle of a musket in his mouth and pulled the trigger. The gun misfired, and the exploding cap frightened the women in the house but left Ruffin unharmed. While the women ran to get his son from the cornfield, Ruffin made a second attempt and took his own life.43His final written words not only expressed bitter enmity toward the North but signaled that the Confederacy would continue to resist even in defeat. The spirit of Edmund Ruffin would live on in the fight for "home rule"—and against Reconstruction.
*Four months later, Robert Cobb Kennedy was captured on American soil, convicted of espionage, and hanged at Fort Lafayette.
*New York City provided 26,000 substitutes and fewer than 10,000 conscripts.
CHAPTER 21
"Condemnation and Reversal of Negro
Suffrage
ome day I will show the stuck-up aristocrats who is running the country," President Andrew Johnson had sworn as a young man in Tennessee. "A cheap purse-proud set they are, not half as good as the man who earns his bread by the sweat of his brow." The vice president who succeeded Lincoln was a Jacksonian Democrat through and through; having grown up poor, Johnson held a grudge against the wealthy planter class that had led the rebellion in the South, and seemed at first to take a hard line against the defeated Confederates. Much to the liking of radical Republicans in Congress, Johnson declared that the rebels "must not only be punished" but "impoverished," and "their social power must be destroyed."1
However, Johnson also distrusted the northeastern elite, the "bloated, corrupt aristocracy" that controlled so much of the nation's industrial and commercial wealth. Moreover, far from sharing the Republicans' abolitionist views, the new president—a former slave owner himself—believed in the supremacy of the white race and referred to blacks, in private, as "niggers." When a delegation led by Frederick Douglass met with Johnson at the White House, he rebuffed their appeals for black suffrage.2At this critical juncture, when blacks needed a defender and a champion, they were confronted instead with a man of uncertain loyalties.
Ultimately Johnson's prejudices would shape his approach to Reconstruction, which he tellingly called "Restoration." Like Lincoln, Johnson believed that while individual secessionists might be punished for treason, the southern states could not and should not be deprived of their rights or treated as conquered territories. Johnson also shared Lincoln's assumption that the president, not Congress, was entitled to play the leading role in the process of Reconstruction. Thus, despite the impression of northern solidarity in the wake of Lincoln's assassination, the new president was on a collision course with radical Republican lawmakers.3
After six weeks in office, Johnson issued a proclamation that essentially reaffirmed the conditions for amnesty set forth by Lincoln on December 8, 1863: All rebels taking an oath of allegiance to the United States—except several categories of Confederate officials—would have their political rights and their property, excluding slaves, fully restored. Proscribed individuals could apply for presidential pardons. Johnson also began appointing provisional governors for the southern states and having them convene delegates to write new state constitutions nullifying secession and abolishing slavery. By empowering southern moderates who had been swept along in the tide of secession, Johnson attempted to foster a new political and social order in the South, but one that still excluded blacks from the voting booth.4
Most Republicans in Congress were willing to give Johnson's "experiment" a chance and to enfranchise southern blacks at some point in the future. However, radical Republicans, led by Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens, loudly denounced Johnson's approach to Reconstruction, warning that without the right to vote, former slaves would be subject to the whim of white governments and little better off than they were before the war. The radicals found themselves in an awkward position, however, since only six northern states allowed blacks to vote and imposed prohibitive property requirements.5 This hypocrisy would prove to be a fatal weakness of Reconstruction.
Instead of voluntarily enfranchising blacks, as some Republicans had hoped they would, ex-Confederates and their new whites-only state governments became openly defiant, insisting on their sovereignty and autonomy in terms that echoed the secession crisis on the eve of the war. Numerous ex-Confederate civilian and military leaders, including former Confederate vice president Alexander Stephens, were soon elected to the U.S. Congress and to state offices.6
The Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery, was ratified in December 1865, but at the same time southern states were enacting "black codes," discriminatory laws that threatened to keep blacks in de facto enslavement even if they were legally free.7* Johnson's rhetoric indicated that he opposed such measures in principle, but in practice he failed to support vigorous action against them.8"It looks as though the President has made up his mind to go whole hog with those who predicted that 'the blacks cannot live among us except as slaves,' and are striving to make good their prophecy," Greeley complained in the pages of the Tribune9 A chorus of Republican criticism and southern flattery inspired Johnson with visions of returning to his Democratic roots and leading the party—reunited across the sectional divide—to victory in the next presidential race.10
Andrew Johnson
Blacks and white Unionists in the South, bereft of presidential support, also became the target of deadly attacks. In May 1866, a traffic accident in Memphis, Tennessee, sparked an orgy of racial violence. After a collision involving two horse-drawn hacks, the police arrested the black driver and let the white one go free. When several black Union veterans stepped in to prevent the arrest, white residents flocked to the scene. The confrontation escalated into three days of rioting, with white mobs, including many Irish policemen and firemen, tearing through black neighborhoods. At least forty-six blacks were killed, five black women were raped, and hundreds of structures—black homes, churches, and schools—were sacked or burned.11
In New Orleans, President Johnson had pardoned the ex-Confederate who became mayor and approved his order forbidding a black suffrage convention which attempted to meet on July 30. Ignoring the president, the commander of federal troops in the city tried to protect the convention delegates, but white rioters, including policemen, arrived first and massacred thirty-seven blacks along with three of their white colleagues. More than one hundred were injured.12
A week later, a remorseless President Johnson declared in a speech that Republicans were responsible for the incident, because their policies antagonized whites and led to mob violence.13 This refrain, heard after the 1834 antiabolition riots in New York and again during the Civil War draft riots, was also becoming the standard Democratic justification for white violence against the campaign for black civil rights during Reconstruction.14
"No matter what the cost," wrote Greeley in the Tribune, "we of the North must take care that Southern Blacks are not left at the mercy of that diabolic
spirit which manifested itself through the late massacres of Memphis and New-Orleans."15
Spurred by the recent violence, moderate Republicans in Congress—including Senators William Fessenden of Maine and Lyman Trumbull of Illinois— joined the radicals, led by Sumner, Julian, and Stevens, in refusing to seat the newly elected southern members and passing legislation to protect blacks physically from assault while guaranteeing their civil rights. However, President Johnson vetoed both a civil rights bill and a bill expanding the Freed-men's Bureau, which was established in March 1865 to assist the former slaves. The new bill authorized the bureau to provide schools for the freed-men. The president insisted that laws targeted at the southern states but passed without their participation were not valid.16
Congressional Republicans redrafted, negotiated, and revised their legislation throughout the winter and spring; by the summer of 1866, they had managed to override Johnson's vetoes and frame the Fourteenth Amendment, which was approved by the necessary two-thirds majority in both houses on June 13, after prolonged debate. The amendment granted the "privileges and immunities" of citizenship to blacks, and the "equal protection of the laws," which did not include a guarantee of the right to vote.17
Instead, the amendment penalized any state that prevented a group of its adult male citizens from voting by reducing the size of the state's congressional delegation. That reduction would be in the same proportion that the number of disfranchised men "shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State." Since the northern states had minuscule black populations compared to the South, the penalty would have no effect and they could blithely continue to disfranchise blacks, Chinese immigrants, and white minorities despised by nativists, including Germans and Irish Catholics. Southern whites, by contrast, would see their political strength diluted either by black suffrage or by a reduced "basis of representation."18
The Devil's Own Work Page 41