Penguin History of the United States of America

by Hugh Brogan

  All plantation societies exhibited this phenomenon after emancipation: they all tended to lapse into subsistence economies, to produce, that is, not for the market but for the immediate needs of the workers. It happened in the British West Indies. It need not have happened in the South had the blacks been given the land and training they desired: they were capable of working extremely hard for themselves, as they had proved on the plantations in South Carolina and Mississippi that had been handed over to them during the war. Now they hoped for further distribution. Had this occurred, not only would Southern blacks have been in a position to preserve and exercise the political, social and legal rights which the North was so anxious to grant them, they might also have largely restored Southern agricultural productivity. Thaddeus Stevens was anxious to give them land. But his proposal went too far for the era. The connection between economic independence and political strength was not clearly seen (though it had been one of Thomas Jefferson’s axioms); the radicals did not want to alienate their conservative allies, whether in the North or the South; and besides there were grave practical difficulties. Under the Southern Homestead Act of 1866, for instance, land was actually made available for distribution among the freedmen, but it was of poor quality and the offer was not taken up. To get decent land for them would have infuriated the envious poor whites as well as the rich. Besides, the legal position was far from clear. The Confiscation Acts had been wartime measures: how could legal proceedings under them be justified now that peace had been restored, when no other proceedings – no treason trials, for example – were being taken against the former rebels, when indeed the President was issuing all those pardons? Johnson had directed the return to their first owners of the Mississippi and South Carolina plantations which the freedmen had been working.8 It would have been infinitely difficult and disagreeable to take them back again, or to make seizures anywhere else; and the South was already seething over the activities of the agents of the US Treasury, who were going here and there confiscating the planters’ last marketable asset, their cotton bales, in settlement of unpaid taxes. It is not surprising that Stevens’s proposals were never taken up; but it was disastrous for the future of the blacks, all the same, and for the South as a whole. The prospects for Southern farming would have been at best precarious, whatever the system of landholding or the distribution of land between the races; but at least a more democratic arrangement, something nearer to what the Republicans envisaged, would have spread the deficits and surpluses more evenly, and by increasing the number of people with money to spend might even have stimulated some measure of that economic growth for which, as it turned out, the South had to wait until the twentieth century.

  The radical programme, then, was crippled from its start; yet the Republicans seemed to hold every trump. First and foremost was the power of Congress to legislate. This power was most usefully employed when yet another amendment, the Fifteenth, was added to the Constitution: it ordained that ‘the right of 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, colour, or previous condition of servitude’, a measure not altogether acceptable even to all Northern opinion, but the state legislatures ratified it and it became part of the Constitution in March 1870. Congress also used its power to sweep away the Johnsonian governments in the South. The Military Reconstruction Act of 2 March 1867 divided the South9 into five military districts, each to be governed by a general of the US army. These generals had the duty of enrolling all qualified voters (in effect, all adult males, except those classes of ex-Confederates excluded by the terms of the Fourteenth Amendment), of calling together constitutional conventions which would set up new, acceptable state governments and of presiding over the first elections under these arrangements. Then, when the new governments had ratified the Fourteenth Amendment and Congress had approved the new constitutions, the reconstructed states would be at last re-admitted to the federal legislature and the military regimes could fade away. This measure went pretty far, and was effective. Opposition to it was ferocious, and discovered certain loopholes and weaknesses; but they were promptly made good by supplementary legislation. By 1870 the process was complete to the Republicans’ satisfaction, and every Southern state was once more represented in Congress.

  The second great asset of the reconstructionists was the blacks. This showed itself in various ways. It quickly became clear, for example, that the new governments, which were chiefly manned by whites who had been Unionists during the war, would not be able to sustain themselves at elections without the help of black voters. So a vigorous programme of political education was undertaken, the object of which was to teach the former slaves how to vote and, especially, how to vote Republican. It would be a mistake to see this as a one-way process, a matter of ‘calling on Africa’. The eagerness of the ex-slaves to make good their freedom was immense, and they did everything they could to support the new regimes, supplying a high proportion of the political personnel. The fact that they could do so quite capably was in itself enough to refute the assertions of the white supremacists, although these, who had no intention of being refuted, preferred to emphasize the inevitable failures rather than the successes. The successes are better worth remembering today. A surprising diversity of African-American leaders emerged. One of them was an Old Etonian; another was a former slave who had learned to read by spying through the window of a white school next to his place of work. Now they provided members of the state conventions and legislatures; U S Representatives; and even two US Senators – Hiram Revels and the ex-slave Blanche K. Bruce, both from Mississippi.10 No black was elected to the Governorship of a state, but Jonathan J. Wright, originally a Pennsylvania lawyer, sat on the Supreme Court of South Carolina, and there were several Lieutenant-Governors. Through these men the African-Americans served notice on an unresponsive white America that they would no longer be passive members of the community.

  However, the Republican leadership in the South during Reconstruction was never predominantly black, and would have failed immediately if it had been. The radicals were also able to call on the energies and abilities of the two groups known respectively as scalawags – that is, Southerners who were ready to break ranks and co-operate with Reconstruction – and carpetbaggers – outsiders from the North who came to Dixie after the war. No two groups have been more maligned in American history, precisely because Reconstruction could not have gone so far as it did without them. Some among them were undoubtedly opportunist rogues of the kind who fanned out over the whole of America after the war, looking for profit and not being too scrupulous as to how they got it. Even the rogues, it might be argued, served a purpose, bringing a breath of fresh air – their brains and energy – into an area that was much in need of such refreshment; and most of the Reconstructionists were decent and valuable citizens. Some were native white Southerners who had learned the lessons of the war and were anxious to apply them: to give the South not only the industrial and financial structure she had lacked, and to make good the fearful material destruction, but also to set up a political, educational and social system like that to which, quite as much as to her wealth, the North owed her victory – to which, indeed, she largely owed her wealth. Many of the carpetbaggers were Union soldiers who had discovered the South during the war and liked the country (much as their descendants discovered California during the Second World War and went back there as soon as they could). Now they came to settle, drawn by an ancient American lure; for, partly as a result of the war, but more because of slavery, much of the South, compared to neighbouring states, was still a wilderness: in other words, a fresh frontier for pioneers to conquer. Behind these aspirant farmers, as on the westward march, came the great capitalists and industrialists, looking for ways of realizing the mineral wealth of the South – the coal of the mountains, the oil of Louisiana, the iron of Alabama.

  Finally, there were the institutional auxiliaries of the federal and state governments: the c
hurches (operating through the American Missionary Association); the army; the state militias, which were raised after the army had shrunk to its normal size and returned to its normal job of hunting Indians; the Union League, the nearest thing there was to a full-time Republican party organization; and, above all, the Freedmen’s Bureau (officially known as the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands). The Bureau was set up by Congress just before the end of the war; during the immediate post-war period it did heroic work in feeding the freedmen, in organizing hospitals and schools for them, and in supervising the terms under which they were hired as free labourers.

  Overall, this was a formidable array of weapons, and it was not wholly ineffective. The new state constitutions did effectively overhaul Southern government, sweeping away the indirect elections of South Carolina, for example, by which in the ante-bellum period the choice of all the highest state officials had been kept in the hands of the planter oligarchs. Property qualifications for voting and office-holding were abolished for ever; the first systems of public education were set up, for whites as well as for blacks, that the South had ever known;11 imprisonment for debt was abolished; state orphanages and lunatic asylums were set up; and a framework of law was provided, modelled on those of the Northern states, within which capitalist corporations could function safely – a major departure for the land of Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. All these important and valuable innovations survived the years of controversy without difficulty, and did something towards the modernization of the South. Even the stimulus to black education, largely the work of the church groups, was not wholly lost in the years ahead; such distinguished universities as Atlanta, Howard (at Washington, DC; named after the head of the Freedmen’s Bureau, General Oliver O. Howard) and Fisk date from this period. The great amendments remained part of the Constitution. But there the credit side of the ledger stops.

  For the question of reconstruction would not ultimately be settled by reason, common sense, good intentions and Congressional enactment. Even the freedmen were not necessary to a settlement, though they had more at stake than anyone else: they were too few, as the slaves had been too few, for their own good. Like the anti-slavery struggle, like the Civil War itself, this was a fight that would be settled by time, will and physical force; but now the greater strength was on the wrong side.

  Time alone would have been enough to defeat the North, had it not had to struggle against the folly and impatience of the white South as well. Most Americans find it hard to keep up a quarrel. They are a friendly, outgoing people; they like to be liked; the slightest show of goodwill and they forget their strongest grievances. To judge by their behaviour, the Northerners were never very vindictive to the Southerners: they could not imagine, for instance, treating fellow-Americans as the Russians treated the Poles after the unsuccessful rising of 1863. They were disconcerted by the relentless hostility that the defeated South displayed: by the insults offered to their soldiers by Southern ladies, the steely refusal of Southern politicians to compromise. ‘At a distance I felt a great sympathy for the people here: now that I am here and know how the pulse of the people beat, I have lost a great portion of my sympathy,’ one young Northerner wrote to his friend, a future President, in 1865.12 Bewilderment changed to rage as the Black Codes were passed, as violence mounted, as Mississippi refused to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment because, forsooth, it gave Congress power to enforce the abolition of slavery, and as Louisiana repudiated the Constitution which Lincoln had defended so earnestly against radical critics, on the grounds that it was ‘the creature of fraud, violence and corruption’. 13 ‘We tell the white men of Mississippi that the men of the North will convert the State of Mississippi into a frog pond before they will allow such laws to disgrace one foot of soil in which the bones of our soldiers sleep and over which the flag of freedom waves,’ said the Chicago Tribune in December 1865. Fine words: but the North could not keep it up. Not all the bad behaviour of the South could ultimately overcome the wish to bury the old dispute, to be magnanimous to a fallen foe, to forget an intractable problem and turn to the rich challenges of the new era of industrialism that was opening. The bloody shirt could not forever distract attention from the excitements of life in the new cities, in the new West, the new factories, the new farms, the new professions, the new pleasures (baseball had suddenly become a national obsession). The attention of the North to affairs below the Mason-Dixon line slackened, and so it became easy to believe the propaganda which said that the reconstructed governments were all insufferably corrupt and incompetent, that the white supremacists knew what was best for blacks, that the radical Republicans were mere twisted fanatics. Besides, time killed off the radical leaders, and they had no successors. The Republican party did not repudiate its old programme (it was far too useful at election times) and indeed continued for another twenty years, though ineffectively, to try to protect the hard-won black right to vote; the Civil War veterans who rapidly came to dominate the party did not forget the cause for which they had fought; but the passion died, or shifted to other issues. Politics was no longer a crusade, but much more a matter of day-to-day business: it was convenient for Presidents, Senators and Congressmen, few of whom would have made convincing crusaders, to seek the co-operation of the Southern leaders rather than their destruction. Besides, the Democratic party in the North soon abandoned the racism which it had embraced so fervently during and immediately after the war, and was prepared to compete for black votes; in return it seemed only fair that the Republicans should compete for white supremacist votes, or at least not stimulate the Southern racists into vigorous action against them. This sort of attitude was made easier by the persistence of race prejudice in the North. As an effective political force it was broken by the war and reconstruction; Northerners were now much more concerned to hate the Irish and the other European immigrants flooding in upon them, rather than the blacks, of whom they saw few; but still, there was no love of the black to make it impossible to forget his injuries. In fact one of the reasons why the North saw so few blacks was that they were not allowed to compete for good Northern jobs. They were excluded from the rising labour unions, and so from the factories, except as strike-breakers recruited by the factory-owners, which did not increase their popularity. By the mid-seventies, in short, the African-American was seen, at best, as a bore and a nuisance. There was no political risk for anyone in abandoning him.

  Southern attitudes were not ductile like Northern ones. The reason was simple enough: too much was at stake. For the North, the Civil War had been primarily a defensive enterprise, which had ended by greatly strengthening the American Union – indeed, by superseding the term: ever since, Americans have tended to talk of ‘the nation’, an even more cohesive idea. For the South, the war had meant the Emancipation Revolution, which had shattered society and all its structures. For the North, ‘reconstruction’, that curiously dry term, meant primarily the political task of reintroducing the defeated states to full participation in politics on tolerable terms. For the South, it meant rebuilding society from the foundations. The task was too important to be either postponed or left to other hands. Decisions taken after Appomattox would settle the fate of the South for the foreseeable future; no wonder there was a bitter competition to have the preponderant influence in their making, and bitter argument as to what they should be.