A Just and Lasting Peace: A Documentary History of Reconstruction

by John David Smith

  All these things may be true, and still a great deal may remain to be done; but it is idle to declare that the sun has not risen because we do not yet see it in the zenith. Even the most extreme Southern newspapers constantly contain paragraphs that amaze us, not only in contrast to slavery times, but in contrast to the times immediately following the war. While I was in South Carolina the Charleston News and Courier published, with commendation, the report of a bill, passed by the Maryland legislature, admitting colored lawyers to practice, after the court of appeals had excluded them; and it copied with implied approval the remark of the Baltimore Gazette: “Raise the educational test, the rigidity of the examinations for admission, or the moral test as high as you please, but let us have done with the color test.”

  It is certain that every republican politician whom I saw in South Carolina, black or white, spoke well of Governor Hampton, with two exceptions,—Mr. W. J. Whipper, whom Governor Chamberlain refused to commission as judge, and Mr. Jones, who was clerk of the house of delegates through its most corrupt period. I give their dissent for what it is worth, but the opinion of others was as I have said. “We have no complaint to make of Governor Hampton; he has kept his pledges,” was the general remark. For instance, a bill passed both houses by a party vote, requiring able-bodied male prisoners, under sentence in county jails, to work on the public roads and streets. The colored people remonstrated strongly, regarding it as aimed at them. Governor Hampton vetoed the bill, and the house, on reflection, sustained the veto by a vote of one hundred and two to ten. But he is not always so strong in influence: there is a minority of “fire-eaters” who resist him; he is denounced by the “upcountry people” as an aristocrat; and I was told that he might yet need the colored vote to sustain him against his own party. Grant that this assumes him to be governed by self-interest; that strengthens the value of this evidence. We do not expect that saints will have the monopoly of government at South or North; what we need is to know that the colored vote in South Carolina makes itself felt as a power, and secures its rightful ends.

  The facts here stated are plain and unquestionable. When we come to consider the political condition of the former slaves, we find greater difficulties in taking in the precise position. First, it must be remembered that even at the North the practical antagonism towards colored voters lasted long after their actual enfranchisement, and has worn out only by degrees. Samuel Breck, in his very entertaining reminiscences, tells us that in Philadelphia, in the early part of this century, the colored voters seldom dared to come to the polls, for fear of ill usage. Then we must remember that in South Carolina, the State which has been most under discussion in this essay, the colored voters were practically massed, for years, under the banner of spoliation, and the antagonism created was hardly less intense than that created by the Tweed dynasty in New York. As far as I can judge, neither the “carpet-bag” frauds nor the “Ku-Klux” persecutions have been exaggerated, and they certainly kept each other alive, and have, at least temporarily, ceased together. No doubt the atrocities committed by the whites were the worst, inasmuch as murder is worse than robbery, but few in South Carolina will now deny that the provocation was simply enormous.

  And it is moreover true that this state of things left bad blood behind it, which will long last. It has left jealousies which confound the innocent with the guilty. Judging the future by the past, the white South Carolinian finds it almost impossible to believe that a republican state administration can be decently honest. This is a feeling quite apart from any national attitude, and quite consistent with a fair degree of loyalty. Nor does it take the form of resistance to colored voters as such. The Southern whites accept them precisely as Northern men in cities accept the ignorant Irish vote,—not cheerfully, but with acquiescence in the inevitable; and when the strict color-line is once broken they are just as ready to conciliate the negro as the Northern politician to flatter the Irishman. Any powerful body of voters may be cajoled to-day and intimidated to-morrow and hated always, but it can never be left out of sight. At the South, politics are an absorbing interest: people are impetuous; they divide and subdivide on all local issues, and each faction needs votes. Two men are up for mayor or sheriff, or what not: each conciliates every voter he can reach, and each finds it for his interest to stand by those who help him. This has been long predicted by shrewd observers, and is beginning to happen all over the South. I heard of a dozen instances of it. Indeed, the vote of thanks passed by the Mississippi legislature to its colored senator, Mr. Bruce, for his vote on the silver bill was only the same thing on a larger scale. To praise him was to censure Mr. Lamar.

  It may be said, “Ah, but the real test is, Will the black voters be allowed to vote for the republican party?” To assert this crowning right will undoubtedly demand a good deal of these voters; it will require courage, organization, intelligence, honesty, and leaders. Without these, any party, in any State, will sooner or later go to the wall. As to South Carolina, I can only say that one of the ablest republican lawyers in the State, a white man, unsuspected of corruption, said to me, “This is a republican State, and to prove it such we need only to bring out our voters. For this we do not need troops, but that half a dozen well-known Northern republicans should canvass the State, just as if it were a Northern State. The colored voters need to know that the party at the North has not, as they have been told, deserted them. With this and a perfectly clean list of nominees, we can carry the legislature, making no nominations against Hampton.” “But,” I asked, “would not these meetings be broken up?” “Not one of them,” he said. “They will break up our local meetings, but not those held by speakers from other States. It would ruin them with the nation.” And this remark was afterwards indorsed by others, white and black. When I asked one of the few educated colored leaders in the State, “Do you regret the withdrawal of the troops by President Hayes?” “No,” he said; “the only misfortune was that they were not withdrawn two years earlier. That would have put us on our good behavior, obliged us to command respect, and made it easier to save the republican party. But it can still be saved.”

  There is no teacher so wholesome as personal necessity. In South Carolina a few men and many women cling absolutely to the past, learning nothing, forgetting nothing. But the bulk of thinking men see that the old Southern society is as absolutely annihilated as the feudal system, and that there is no other form of society now possible except such as prevails at the North and West. “The purse-proud Southerner,” said Rev. Dr. Pinckney, in his address at Charleston, “is an institution which no longer exists. The race has passed away as completely as the Saurian tribes, whose bones we are now digging from the fossil beds of the Ashley.” “The Yankees ought to be satisfied,” said one gentleman to me: “every live man at the South is trying with all his might to be a Yankee.” Business, money, financial prosperity,—these now form the absorbing Southern question. At the Exchange Hotel in Richmond, where I spent a Sunday, the members of the Assembly were talking all day about the debt,—how to escape bankruptcy. I did not overhear the slightest allusion to the negro or the North. It is likely enough that this may lead to claims on the national treasury, but it tends to nothing worse. The dream of reënslaving the negro, if it ever existed, is like the negro’s dream, if he ever had it, of five acres and a mule from the government. Both races have long since come down to the stern reality of self-support. No sane Southerner would now take back as slaves, were they offered, a race of men who have been for a dozen years freemen and voters.

  Every secessionist risked his all upon secession, and has received as the penalty of defeat only poverty. It is the mildest punishment ever inflicted after an unsuccessful civil war, and it proves in this case a blessing in disguise. Among Southern young men it has made energy and industry fashionable. Formerly, if a Southern planter wished to travel, he borrowed money on his coming crop, or sold a slave or two. Now he must learn what John Randolph, of Roanoke, once announced as the phil
osopher’s stone, to “pay as you go.” The Northern traveler asks himself, Where are the white people of the South? You meet few in public conveyances; you see no crowd in the streets. In the hotels of Washington you rarely hear the Southern accent, and, indeed, my Virginia friends declared that some of its more marked intonations were growing unfashionable. Out of one hundred and three Southern representatives in Congress, only twenty-three have their families with them. On one of the few day trains from Washington to Richmond, there was but one first-class car, and there were not twenty passengers, mostly from the Northern States. Among some fifty people on the steamboat from Savannah to Jacksonville, there were not six Southerners. Everywhere you hear immigration desired and emigration recognized as a fact. My friend the judge talked to me eloquently about the need of more Northern settlers, and the willingness of all to receive them; the plantations would readily be broken up to accommodate any purchaser who had money. But within an hour, his son, a young law student, told me that as soon as he was admitted to the bar he should go West.

  The first essential to social progress at the South is that each State should possess local self-government. The States have been readmitted as States, and can no more be treated as Territories than you can replace a bird in the egg. They must now work out their own salvation, just as much as Connecticut and New Jersey. If any abuses exist, the remedy is not to be found in federal interference, except in case of actual insurrection, but in the voting power of the blacks, so far as they have strength or skill to assert it; and where that fails, in their power of locomotion. They must leave those counties or States which ill-use them for others which treat them better. If a man is dissatisfied with the laws of Massachusetts, and cannot get them mended, he can at least remove into Rhode Island or Connecticut, and the loss of valuable citizens will soon make itself felt.

  This is the precise remedy possessed by the colored people at the South, with the great advantage that they have the monopoly of all the leading industries, and do not need the whites more, on the whole, than the whites need them. They have reached the point where civilized methods begin to prevail. When they have once enlisted the laws of political economy on their side, this silent ally will be worth more than an army with banners.

  D. H. CHAMBERLAIN, “RECONSTRUCTION AND THE NEGRO”

  (February 1879)

  Daniel Henry Chamberlain (1835–1907) was a Massachusetts native who, after studying at Yale and Harvard, served with an all-black cavalry troop in the Civil War and then after the war settled in South Carolina. Elected a delegate to the state’s constitutional convention, Chamberlain rose quickly in South Carolina’s Republican party, serving as attorney general under Governor Robert K. Scott (1868–72) and then as governor (1874–76). In condemning the Hamburg Massacre as “a barbarity which could only move a civilized person to shame and disgust,” Chamberlain drove away Democratic supporters, and he lost his bid for reelection in South Carolina’s contested 1876 election. Following his departure from South Carolina, Chamberlain practiced law and became increasingly conservative in his historical memory of Reconstruction. In 1879, however, when reflecting on Reconstruction, especially the role of African-Americans in its stormy history, Chamberlain gave the freedpeople high marks. “No people or race,” he explained, had overcome so much to earn “the very highest title to exercise the rights and assume the duties of self-government.”

  The condition of the colored race of the South has been, for at least forty years, the leading question in our politics. For the most part it has been an unwelcome question, forcing itself into prominence and compelling attention against the choice and interest of most of our political leaders and their followers. The two forces which would otherwise have shaped our political ends—commerce and empire—have feared and hated this issue. The business interests of the country have constantly deprecated its agitation; the pride of empire, the sentiment of nationality, has always deplored its existence and struggled to banish it from the political field. The statesmen who from 1835 to 1860 held the foremost places of political honor and influence were engaged in a continuous effort to settle it by superficial compromises. Their successors at the North, with comparatively few exceptions, refused practically to recognize its essential and controlling power except under the final stress of unavoidable necessity. The same influences were strongly felt at the close of the war. Not a few of the leaders of the party which had pushed the conflict of arms to a successful close resumed the old temper of compromise in dealing with the new phases which this question then presented. Business and the desire for a formal national unity loudly demanded the restoration of the South without further changes than such as the war had actually accomplished.

  Throughout this long conflict, the history of which is too fresh to need fuller statement, the nature of the issue touched and enlisted the deepest forces that affect human society. It was primarily an ethical question, a strict question of moral right and wrong. No economical or political tests could alone decide it. Conscience and the moral sense claimed jurisdiction of the question whether the colored race should be treated as men or as brutes, as brethren or as aliens and outcasts from the human family. The moral convictions of the North would permit no settlement which did not recognize the complete manhood of this race. The stubborn and fanatic bigotry of the South would consent to no settlement which did not leave the political power of the States exclusively in the hands of the white race. Under these influences and circumstances the question, by what methods conformable to our system of government the civil rights belonging generally to other citizens might be practically secured to the colored race, became, in the judgment of a majority of the people, the most serious political problem growing out of the war. The result was the enactment by Congress, over the President’s veto, of the reconstruction act of March 2, 1867, making it the condition of the restoration of the seceding States that new constitutions should be adopted, framed by “delegates elected by the male citizens, twenty-one years old and upward, of whatever race, color, or previous condition,” and securing to all such persons the elective franchise. Under the provisions of this act all the seceding States were finally restored to their practical relations to the Union.

  In the light of present results, the policy of universal suffrage thus enforced at the South is condemned not only by those who originally opposed it, but by many who were hitherto its advocates. It becomes, therefore, an appropriate inquiry, whether universal suffrage at the South, or especially what is commonly called negro suffrage, was a mistake. Such an inquiry should be made, if possible, without reference to partisan opinions or interests. The present condition of the colored race of the South can not be viewed with toleration by any right-minded man who is acquainted with the facts. It is certain, too, from the nature of the question itself, as well as its close relations to all our public interests, that it will remain, as heretofore, an issue which can not be avoided. Settlements may be attempted which shall again leave this race to its fate, to an unaided and friendless struggle with the hostile forces which surround it; but such settlements will settle nothing. In the mean time it is well to consider whether whatever degree of failure may be fairly said to characterize the present results of the plan of Southern reconstruction is due either to the principle applied in the general enfranchisement of the colored race, or to the incapacity of that race to properly exercise the rights conferred.

  In determining the correctness of the principle adopted in the enfranchisement of the colored race, it is essential to recall the chief features of the situation when that measure was adopted. A war of four years, with its enormous sacrifices of life and property, had just ended. The cause of the war was the existence under the Government of the republic of the system of chattel slavery. Aside from this system the Government was essentially republican. All other leading influences had, for more than three quarters of a century, tended toward its harmonious growth, development, and consolidation. Territory and population
had increased beyond precedent. A commanding position had been reached among the nations. All the elements of national prosperity and greatness had been developed to a high degree. Slavery, the one anti-republican influence, had put at hazard all this growth and glory. It had struck at the life of the nation. The struggle had agonized the land. The plain and inevitable lesson of this experience was, that our Government, to be safe, must be self-consistent; that, in Mr. Lincoln’s words, “this Government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free”; that no anti-republican element can be safely suffered to remain in the fabric of our Government.

  This lesson was strongly enforced by the influence of the great principles which inspired the founders of our Government, and still constituted the professed faith of the republic. By those principles the nation was “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Except in the slave States the suffrage had been the sign and safeguard of that civil equality contemplated by the fathers. The extension of the suffrage had kept even pace with the progress of our most prosperous and enlightened communities. The enjoyment by all citizens of the right of suffrage was therefore regarded as the true corner-stone of our Government as well as the best if not the only guarantee of individual freedom. In fixing the political conditions of the seceding States, the traditions and principles of our Government united in pointing to universal suffrage as the true defense of public welfare and personal rights.

  But, at the time of which we speak, disloyalty to the national Government characterized the whole white population of the South. The weapons of armed rebellion had but just been wrenched from their hands. To permit the political power of the restored States to be wielded exclusively by this class, was to invite the recurrence of the dangers so lately experienced. A basis of loyalty must be found on which to build the new governments. The colored race alone furnished this indispensable condition of reconstruction. Their loyalty to the Union was undoubted. It was deep, passionate, unfaltering. If, then, the conquered communities of the South were to be restored to political life and to resume their position as States, the logic of republican principles, the principles of the Declaration of Independence, and the logic of events and surrounding circumstances, alike pointed to the immediate enfranchisement of the colored race as the chief feature in a wise plan of reconstruction. Gradual enfranchisement could not meet the conditions then existing. Tests of property or education, if ever wise or admissible, under our theory of Government, were clearly inadmissible here. The application of these tests would exclude those whose influence and participation could alone insure a republican basis for the new governments and the political predominance of those who were loyal to the General Government.