The apparent contradictions in their pronouncements about conciliation and reconstruction were not viewed by blacks as contradictions at all. While wishing to live in racial harmony with their fellow whites, they asked only that the relationship henceforth be based on legal equality. While asking no indemnities for the past and expressing a willingness to forgive whites for the sins of slaveholding, they did insist upon security for the future. That consideration, more than any other, informed the attitude toward southern reconstruction developed in the immediate postwar years by a coterie of black leaders, many of whom would subsequently play a significant role in the political life of their respective states. Revealing at times a fine grasp of political strategy, they viewed the various proposals regarding amnesty for former Confederates as inseparable from their own claims to be admitted to all political privileges. That is, white men who had committed treason (as defined by the Constitution) by waging war against the United States could obviously not be trusted again with political power, unless they shared that power with blacks who had proven their loyalty to republican principles and to the sanctity of the Union. Nor could such power be safely reposed in the exclusive hands of southern Unionists, as President Lincoln envisioned, for their love of the Union reflected a desire to return to the past and their forced acceptance of the Emancipation Proclamation indicated no real concern for the condition or future of the ex-slave.44
Whatever might be done with the “political criminals” who had led the South out of the Union, the New Orleans Tribune, voicing the usually more radical position of the city’s mulatto community, insisted that any magnanimity be within well-defined limits and acknowledge the need for a different organization of southern society.
We are not enemies of amnesty, and we do not ask to visit the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that have Union and freedom. We are strong and generous enough to disdain retaliation, and let the assassins of Fort Pillow expiate their crime by a long and miserable existence. Although wronged to the last and deprived of our best blood by this unholy rebellion, we do not ask for the lives of the bloodthirsty foes. An amnesty sparing the lives of the culprits will be something magnanimous, and worthy of our great and generous Republic. But at the same time that we spare the lives of our vanquished foes, let their property be forfeited.
Considering the punishments usually meted out to a people defeated in war, the editor’s amnesty proposal seemed eminently fair. Rather than execute or imprison the men who had betrayed the country, he suggested only that the wealthy among them be reduced to poverty—that is, to a condition already shared by millions of people who had stood by their government and had fought and sacrificed their lives to preserve it. If many whites who knew little of labor were thereby forced to work, that would also be a most constructive form of rehabilitation.
Let them go to work; let them handle the spade or the hoe, for their own benefit, as free laborers—we mean really free;—give them a chance for retrieving their fallen fortune. To work is holy, honorable and noble. Let them have a taste of it.… It is enough for the republic to spare the life of the rebels,—without restoring to them their plantations and palaces. The whole world will applaud the wisdom of the principle: amnesty for the persons, no amnesty for the property.45
Although large numbers of blacks—both the politically articulate and the masses—might have sympathized with such “radicar” notions of amnesty and reconstruction, few black spokesmen publicly embraced a position they deemed politically untenable. In subsequent years, in fact, black leadership, although united in the determination to preserve the gains of Reconstruction, sharply divided over the wisdom of removing disfranchisement from ex-Confederate leaders. To permit them to return to active political participation seemed like the best way to win their approval of the work of black reconstructionists. But the democratic propensities of black leaders in this respect would also prove to be their undoing. The New Orleans Tribune clearly anticipated as much more than two years before the advent of Radical Reconstruction. Neither the Civil War nor emancipation, that newspaper argued, had really altered the mentality of the old slaveholding class, nor should blacks expect any genuine conversion to racial egalitarianism and democratic principles.
We must despair of this generation; for this generation has handled the whips and sold human flesh in the market; and they are corrupt. Let them die in peace. But, for God and the country’s sake, do not make of them Governors, Lieutenant Governors, Judges, Mayors, Sheriffs, Senators and Ministers to foreign countries.… We have had enough of shame and humiliation. The nation has washed out the black spot on her escutcheon. Shall we honor and obey, now, the very men who made the blot?46
Since the policies of Presidents Lincoln and Johnson seemed calculated to produce precisely that result, the warning had been well grounded.
Despite the disappointment over Lincoln’s lenient amnesty program, his misplaced confidence in southern Unionists, and his “moderate” experiments in state reconstruction, the assassination of the President silenced his black critics and threw a stunned black community into deep mourning, as though it had lost its only white friend and protector. The President’s initial doubts about the wisdom of emancipation and the enlistment of blacks were now forgotten, his equivocations on civil rights ignored, his schemes of colonization, expatriation, and reconstruction forgiven. Even the cold language and forced nature of his Emancipation Proclamation no longer seemed relevant, giving way to the legend of the Great Emancipator. “Hereafter, through all time,” prophesied one black newspaper, “wherever the Black Race may be known in the world; whenever and wherever it shall lay the foundations of its power; build its cities and rear its temples, it will sacredly preserve if not deify the name of ‘Abraham, the Martyr.’ ” In heaping their praise on the fallen President, black clerics, editors, and common laborers tended to repeat the same themes and evoke the same images. He had completed the noble work begun by John Brown—“two martyrs, whose memories will live united in our bosoms.” He was “the only President who ever had the courage to acknowledge the true manhood of the negro.” He had been “the greatest earthly friend of the colored race,” “a Martyr to his cause, and a Sacrifice to his country.”47 In a church on St. Helena Island, South Carolina, freedmen prayed for Lincoln as they would have prayed only for the Saviour himself. Christ had saved them from sin, Lincoln had rescued them from slavery, and more than one freedman thought them indistinguishable: “Lincoln died for we, Christ died for we, and me believe him de same mans.” The manner of his death made him a logical black hero, victimized by the same spirit of malice and hatred that had brutalized black people for generations. For that very reason, the South could not escape responsibility by ascribing the act to “individual insanity,” at least not in the view of numerous black spokesmen. To treat the assassin as a madman, they argued, would be to ignore the record of deliberate and rational oppression from which four million black men and women had only begun to emerge.48
Among substantial numbers of freedmen, the initial shock of Lincoln’s death was compounded by apprehension over the future. If the President (“Massa Sam”) and the government were one and the same, as some blacks assumed, the results of the war, including emancipation, appeared to be jeopardized. “We going to be slaves again?” more than one freedman thought to ask. To Jack Flowers, who had made a spectacular wartime escape to the Union lines in South Carolina, the assassination threatened to undo his exploit. “I ’spect it’s no use to be here,” he said dejectedly. “I might as well stayed where I was. It ’pears we can’t be free, nohow. The rebs won’t let us alone. If they can’t kill us, they’ll kill all our friens’, sure.” Former slaveholders had seized upon the President’s death to taunt the freedmen about the suddenly dim prospects of freedom, a concerned missionary wrote from Florida, “and some of our people began to talk of going north to escape enslavement again, for as Massa Lincoln was gone they feared their hope was
gone too.” More typical may have been the many whites who expressed immediate concern over how the freed slaves would react to the assassination. Not unexpectedly, new rumors of insurrectionary conspiracies circulated and the white residents of a number of towns implored Federal authorities to double their precautions to keep the blacks quiet and orderly.49
To black spokesmen who had been openly critical of President Lincoln’s reconstruction and amnesty programs, and to those who had repressed their misgivings, the significance of the assassination seemed abundantly clear. The President had been victimized by his own magnanimity. His confidence in southern redemption and repentance had been rewarded with an assassin’s bullet. The New Orleans Tribune, which had been highly critical of the President, used the assassination to demonstrate that the nation’s enemies had not yet been vanquished.
Abraham Lincoln, the honest, the good, the religious man, who did not understand—be it said to his honor and glory—duplicity and trickery, believed in the protestations and solemn oaths of rebels. He was too confident, too lenient, and too mild. He was repaid with a pistol’s bullet. He did not know—as we do—what chivalry is.
Upon hearing of the assassination, black clergymen attending a conference of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Baltimore reacted in virtually the same manner, praising Lincoln’s good works, forgiving his sins (“His errors were errors of the head, not of the heart”), and, most importantly, urging “a sterner course” and the application of “more rigid principles” toward the defeated South. If the American people heeded the obvious lesson of this event, black spokesmen declared, they would realize soon enough that most white Southerners remained “incorrigible rebels” who willingly and deceitfully took the oath of allegiance to recover their property and political power; the Rebels expected to win at the ballot box what they had lost on the battlefield, and President Lincoln had been naïve enough to believe their protestations of loyalty. Fortunately, his successor knew better. The future lay in good hands, most of these same black spokesmen agreed, for the new President understood “Southern pretenses and Southern excesses” from his own experience and he would now do his duty. “Agag is to be hewn into pieces,” a confident black cleric proclaimed, “and Samuel must come forward and wield the sword of destruction—that man is Andrew Johnson.”50
Despite the grievous loss of Lincoln, then, black spokesmen were almost unanimous in their belief that Providence had chosen “a second Moses” to guide them to “the land of promise.” None other than Andrew Johnson himself made that solemn pledge, in addressing the black people of Nashville: “Humble and unworthy as I am, if no other better shall be found, I will be your Moses, and lead you through the Red Sea of War and Bondage to a fairer future of Liberty and Peace.” The New Orleans Tribune, with its own radical notions of reconstruction, thought well enough of the new President to predict that his previously expressed hostility to concentrations of political and economic power in the South presaged a vigorous policy of land confiscation and redistribution. Like Lincoln, Johnson was perceived as a man who exemplified the genius of democratic institutions, having risen from a humble station to the highest office in the land. He had proven his loyalty to the Union, and surely no man who had suffered “the malignity of the Rebels,” as had Johnson, would seek to restore those “traitors” to power. Where Lincoln had equivocated, Johnson could be expected to be decisive. Where Lincoln had been overly magnanimous in his treatment of the ex-Confederates, Johnson, who knew these people far more intimately, would be firm and unyielding.51
The assessment of Johnson’s personality traits proved accurate enough, but blacks had badly misjudged his politics and racial views. In upholding the principles of white supremacy, in expediting the pardon of ex-Confederate leaders, in seeking to restore political and economic power to the old ruling class, President Johnson would act all too decisively. And in opposing even minimal civil rights for blacks, he would be firm and unyielding. For some blacks, the disillusionment came earlier than for most. Even as black newspapers and leaders still voiced their confidence in the new President, field hands forced off the lands of pardoned Rebels suspected that the battle had already been lost. At least, that was the conclusion reached by a white teacher in the Sea Islands, as former masters returned to claim their lands.
The people receive the rebels better than we expected, but the reason is that they believe Johnson is going to put them in their old masters’ power again, and they feel that they must conciliate or be crushed. They no longer pray for the President—our President, as they used to call Lincoln—in the church. They keep an ominous silence and are very sad and troubled.52
For black spokesmen, the President’s decision to pursue a “moderate” reconstruction plan, permitting the white South to reconstruct herself without black participation, prompted an initial disappointment that soon gave way to disbelief. What blacks had viewed (on Johnson’s assurance) as an “experimental” policy, designed to test white loyalty and intentions, turned into a nightmare of repression, Black Codes, and unequal justice. But rather than give up the “experiment” as a failure, which black leaders had confidently expected, the President insisted that the new state governments be legitimized. And blacks were left to contemplate still again the betrayal of their expectations by a man they had only recently praised so unrestrainedly. “Johnson has sold us,” Frederick Douglass wrote the publisher of the New Orleans Tribune in October 1865, but it remained for Congress “to pass upon the bargain.” Two months later, as Congress prepared to convene, the Tribune voiced the now deepening black disillusionment with the President’s policies. The editor urged Congress to assume control of reconstruction, to make “no compromises with a conservative and exclusively white-man loving administration,” and to hold the President to his initial commitments. If treason were to be made “infamous,” as Johnson had so often promised, the mode of punishment would have to be severer than the rapidly accumulating stack of executive pardons of former Confederate leaders suggested.53
The President’s response to a delegation of black leaders in February 1866 did little to reassure the few blacks who still retained faith in him. At this none too harmonious exchange of views in the White House, Johnson introduced himself as “a friend of humanity, and especially the friend of the colored man.” He offered once again, if they wished, to serve as their Moses to lead them from bondage to freedom. But he made it clear that he would not lead them to the ballot box, for that would only endanger their freedom and invite race war. Reaffirming his belief in government by consent of the governed, he interpreted that principle to mean that the white people in each state should determine the question of black suffrage. The President pointedly ignored the delegate who asked him if he would apply the principle of majority rule to states like South Carolina, where blacks comprised a majority of the population. Nor did he take kindly to Frederick Douglass’ argument that blacks needed the vote to protect themselves from the already rampant violence which the President thought would be unleashed in the event of black suffrage. As the exchange became increasingly acrimonious, both sides thought it best to terminate the meeting, and Douglass told his fellow delegates: “The President sends us to the people, and we go to the people.” After the “darkey delegation” left, President Johnson reportedly turned to a private secretary and exclaimed, “Those damned sons of bitches thought they had me in a trap! I know that damned Douglass; he’s just like any nigger, and he would sooner cut a white man’s throat than not.” Whether the President actually made that remark, he proceeded to act in its spirit.54
Within months after the White House meeting, the break between the President and black leadership would be complete. James Lynch had acclaimed Andrew Johnson on July 4, 1865, as a firm champion of the African race, but by March 1866 he thought the President was “more to be pitied than feared.” Henry M. Turner was less charitable, deeming the President dangerous as well as pitiful. “I charge Mr. Johnson with the murder of thousands of our
people; for though he does not kill them personally, yet he abets, or gives aid to these murderers, so that it actually amounts to a direct encouragement.” No longer the noble successor to the martyred Lincoln, Johnson now loomed for blacks as the new Jefferson Davis. Presuming to be a second Moses, he acted more like “a very excellent type of Pharaoh.” Pretending to sympathize with the ex-slaves in their new freedom, he vetoed the legislation blacks deemed essential to preserve that freedom. And when he advised the states to reject the Fourteenth Amendment, blacks turned to Congress for an alternative to the callous disregard of human rights that distinguished the occupant of the White House. “The future looks dark,” a black newspaper observed, “and we predict, that we are entering upon the greatest political contest that has ever agitated the people of the country—a contest, in which, we of the South must be for the most part spectators; not indifferent spectators, for it is about us that the political battle is fought. The issue is fairly joined.”55
5
WITH THE ISSUE “fairly joined,” the same urgency that prompted black leaders to look to Congress for relief also moved equal suffrage to the forefront of their demands. The initial hesitation to press that issue, as at the Freedmen’s Convention in North Carolina in 1865, proved short-lived, particularly after the conciliatory appeals to the constitutional conventions and state legislatures had yielded only oppressive Black Codes and not even a hint of future political participation. For black leadership, the suffrage issue quickly assumed a significance that rivaled the emotional investment tens of thousands of black laborers had made in the idea of “forty acres and a mule.” Both suffrage and land came to be regarded, albeit with sharply contrasting emphases by different classes of the black population, as indispensable to freedom. Only by winning the vote, black leaders told their people, would the other aspirations they cherished have a chance for fulfillment. “The only salvation for us besides the power of the Government,” Virginia freedmen declared, “is in the possession of the ballot. Give us this, and we will protect ourselves.”56
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