One Philadelphia newspaper, a hair more realistic, acknowledged the odiousness of the Black Codes. Still, the article continued, the codes were necessary. Perhaps the form they took was a touch too severe, but the Black Codes, it argued, were not about trying to re-establish slavery. The Southern states “just wanted to stop vagrancy and put an end to the undeniable evils of idleness and pauperism arising from the sudden emancipation of so many slaves.” By compelling them to work, the argument went, this measure prevented the newly freed from becoming a “burden upon society.” What the paper failed to recognize was that black people’s willingness to work had never been the problem. Having to work for free, under backbreaking conditions and the threat of the lash, was the real issue.
Nor did Johnson’s policies or the Black Codes ensure that African Americans would not be a “burden upon society.” If anything, they guaranteed the opposite. Blacks were denied access to land, banned from hunting and fishing, and forbidden to work independently using skills honed and developed while enslaved, such as blacksmithing. Under such conditions, self-sufficiency could never have been achieved.
The bottom line was that black economic independence was anathema to a power structure that depended on cheap, exploitable, rightless labor and required black subordination. But instead of honing in on this fundamental reality, the Philadelphia newspaper simply bemoaned the unforeseen and unfortunate consequences of the Black Codes for whites, complaining that, since “planters refuse to pay wages at all” to blacks, due to the landowners’ claims that “negroes are so lazy as not to be worth paying,” there was a downward pressure on overall wages that left poor whites unable to find work that provided enough “to keep soul and body together.” And yet, even when the constituency for whom Andrew Johnson swore he served got caught in the blowback of these ruthless laws, he did not lift a finger to stop it.60
As another article in the paper asserted, the South was in much better shape than could have been expected, and this was because of the president’s policies, which were “worthy of our admiration.” Johnson understood, the paper contended, that the “war was for the Union, and the Union has been restored beyond our most sanguine expectations.” The president, then, was to be commended for a “job well done.”61
Andrew Johnson could not have agreed more. His message to Congress in December 1865 had that same upbeat, triumphal cadence: The war was over. The South was repentant. New governments had been formed. The federal government, he concluded, had done what it had set out to do and done it beautifully. He had heard some rumblings about voting and civil rights for the freedpeople, but any lingering questions about rights, despite the enforcement clause in the Thirteenth Amendment, Johnson felt, were matters for the states.62
This congratulatory, rose-colored vision of the State of the Union ignored the brutal conditions that greeted four million people by the war’s end. Johnson dismissed the numerous reports of mutilated black bodies piled up like logs, did not hear the incessant crack of the whips tearing into black flesh, and found in the draconian Black Codes that reinstalled slavery by another name nothing but progress. How stunning, too, that such a prideful, stubborn man could swallow his dignity over and over again when the states he had just welcomed back into the fold defied even the very low standards he had set to rejoin the United States of America. South Carolina ratified the Thirteenth Amendment only after the state had attached a declaration with its own series of “if, then, but” clauses nullifying any federal right to enforce the anti-slavery provision. To make its point perfectly clear, the state also refused to renounce its Articles of Secession. Louisiana and Alabama attached their own addenda negating congressional authority over the status of slavery within their borders.63 Florida held out against ratification until nearly the bitter end, December 28, 1865, and had to do it again in 1868; Texas held out even longer (1870). Mississippi, whose governor, a Confederate general pardoned three days after winning the gubernatorial election, just flat out refused to ratify the amendment.64 Indeed, such was Mississippi’s obstinacy that it delayed ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment until 2013.65 But despite at least half the old Confederacy mocking and treating contemptuously his olive branch, Johnson was pleased with what he had done. Not only had the Union been preserved, but also the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, no matter how halfhearted or tarnished, meant that the existence of chattel slavery would never threaten the sanctity of the nation again. As the president surveyed all that he had accomplished, he was satisfied. He simply could not fathom that Northern Republicans, concerned about the complete deprivation of rights for freedpeople, would criticize or try to undo what he had so painstakingly stitched together.66
For many Northern congressmen, the Black Codes sparked a general sense of outrage. Even some Southern whites thought the codes were just a bit too audacious and precipitous. “ ‘We showed our hand too soon,’ a Mississippi planter conceded. ‘We ought to have waited till the troops were withdrawn, and our representatives admitted to Congress; then we could have had everything our way.’ ”67 He was right. Voluminous testimony about whippings, killings, and virtual slavery were all too much for Congress to stomach. The sight of unrepentant leaders of the Confederacy, such as Gettysburg General Benjamin Humphreys, now Mississippi governor, fully ensconced in state governments, as if the war had never happened, was infuriating. The smugness of Andrew Johnson—who was president, as some said, only because of John Wilkes Booth—rebuilding the nation without even the advice and counsel of the legislative branch was unacceptable. For Congress, the core issue was the newly emancipated; without any rights, without any citizenship, they would be left without any hope. They would be at the mercy of the same slavocracy that had left more than six hundred thousand dead.
If the Radical Republicans, led by Representative Thaddeus Stevens (R-PA) and Senator Charles Sumner (R-MA), sought for African Americans a sweeping agenda—land, citizenship, and the vote (and that is what made them “radical”)—the majority of Congress was unwilling to go that far.68 Moderate Republicans did believe, however, that Johnson had not gone far enough. At a bare minimum, citizenship needed to be fully acknowledged and the Freedmen’s Bureau, which by law was set to shut its doors in April 1866, had to continue setting up schools for the newly freed, because at the time of emancipation, just a little more than 3 percent of four million formerly enslaved were literate. Congress, therefore, passed both the Freedmen’s Bureau Bill and the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which defined as citizens all persons born in the United States, except for Native Americans. The moderates believed they had stripped out the most objectionable clauses from the legislation—the right to vote and widespread land distribution—so that President Johnson could now easily sign both bills into law.69
They were wrong. So venomous was Johnson’s veto of the Freedmen’s Bureau Bill that it left even his supporters in Congress stunned. He railed against the unconstitutionality of the legislation, given that eleven rebel states, despite their newly formed governments, were not represented in Congress. He denounced the creation of a judicial system under the Freedmen’s Bureau when there were perfectly good courts already in existence in the South. He raged against the beginnings of a bloated federal bureaucracy designed to tend to the needs of “one class of people” while ignoring “our own race.” He demanded to know why the government would build schools for blacks when it did not even do that for whites. Johnson further lectured that the modest land provision still in existence from Sherman’s Special Field Order No. 15 was just plain wrong and set a horrible precedent. The government “never deemed itself authorized to expend the public money for the rent or purchase of homes for the thousands, not to say millions, of the white race who are honestly toiling from day to day for their subsistence,” so why would it do so for the freedmen?70
This bill, he was convinced, was designed to set up black dependency on the federal government. And he was having none of it. Negroes, he insisted, should have the wherewithal to
fend for themselves. The president, despite evidence to the contrary, concurred with his advisers that “the current condition of a freedman was ‘not so bad.’ ”
His condition is not so exposed as may at first be imagined. He is in a portion of the country where his labor cannot well be spared. Competition for his services from planters, from those who are constructing or repairing railroads, or from capitalists in his vicinage, or from other States, will enable him to command almost his own terms. He also possesses a perfect right to change his place of abode, and if, therefore, he does not find in one community or State a mode of life suited to his desires, or proper remuneration for his labor, he can move to another where labor is more esteemed and better rewarded.
Johnson insisted that the “laws that regulate supply and demand will maintain their force, and the wages of the laborer will be regulated thereby.” Moreover, given these very highly favorable conditions, the president asserted, blacks could build their own schools and buy their own land instead of waiting for a handout from the government. “It is earnestly hoped that instead of wasting away, they will, by their own efforts, establish for themselves a condition of respectability and prosperity.”71
Even as he complained bitterly that Congress would not recognize the duly elected representatives from the eleven rebel states he had welcomed back into the Union, Johnson ignored the fact that seven of those states had either refused to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment or stated that they would do so only with clauses that negated any federal authority, and ten of them had instituted the Black Codes, which strongly suggested that slavery was alive and well in the Confederate South. Like Louisiana, those states proudly trumpeted the systematic exclusion of millions of African-descended people from the government.
Similarly, while the president supposedly fretted about government intrusion into the economy, he voiced no concern whatsoever when the leaders of the Confederacy, whom he had just pardoned, used the power of the state, via the Black Codes, to derail the very market forces he touted as the cure for the post-slavery blues. Government intervention ensured that African Americans could not take their labor to the best employer; could not move “to another abode” for fear of being arrested on vagrancy charges and auctioned off; could not use their skills for anything but cleaning the plantation owners’ houses, picking cotton, chopping sugarcane, or planting tobacco and rice. The laws of supply and demand, Johnson’s alleged panacea, could not operate. His determination to ensure that this was “a white man’s government” had undercut not only democracy but the basic tenets of capitalism as well.
That same hypocrisy was evident in Johnson’s vision of landownership. While claiming that the government had never provided access to land for “hard toiling whites,” Johnson simply erased the nineteen years that he had worked for the passage of the Homestead Act to ensure that his constituency was given 160 acres wrested or browbeaten from Native Americans. Meanwhile, he cringed that the formerly enslaved would lease forty acres abandoned by those whom he had once called “traitors.” Perhaps this disparity in treatment reflected Johnson’s wish to reward those who embodied the “good old American work ethic.” The truth was much more complicated.
Mississippi’s Article of Secession, for example, while extolling the enormous wealth generated from planting and picking cotton, contended that the environmental conditions were too harsh in the Magnolia State for whites to actually do that work.72 When, as a teenager, future president of the Confederacy Jefferson Davis had refused to go to school, his father sent him into the cotton fields. But he did not last long. “After the boy spent two days stooping under the Mississippi sun, the classroom became more appealing.”73 Shortly after the war, a Philadelphia newspaper reported that “all northern men visiting” the South had one “universal complaint”: “White men are as averse to labor as ever. Rich or poor, they all ignore work.”74 Similarly, Carl Schurz reported that in his conversation with a plantation owner, who was beside himself that emancipation had left him without any slaves to do the heavy lifting, the man dismissed the idea of working the land himself. “The idea that he would work with his hands as a farmer seemed to strike him as ludicrously absurd. He told me with a smile that he had never done a day’s work of that kind in his life.”75 U.S. Supreme Court justice Samuel Miller was equally astounded by the “pretence … that the negro won’t work without being compelled to do so,” especially when the charge was being “made in a country and by the white people, where the negro has done all the work for four generations, and where the white man makes a boast of the fact that he will not labour.”76 Nonetheless, Johnson had absolutely no qualms about using the power of government to ensure that plantation owners and poor whites gained or regained title to millions of acres of land, whereas those who had actually labored hard in the vast fields were treated as criminals and vagrants who needed the threat of the whip in order to work.77
The president’s concerns about a proposed judicial system where freedpeople might be able to find some justice for the violence raining down on them proved a similar Janus-faced sophistry. Johnson insisted that the existing court structure was fair, equitable, and fully functioning. Southern courts, in fact, were “racist, biased, obstructionist, and oblivious to northern opinion. Southern judges and law enforcement officials … looked the other way when ex-rebels committed violent crimes against blacks and white Unionists. State courts forbade testimony by blacks, making crimes against African Americans nearly impossible to prove. Black veterans of the Union army were particular targets of unpunished violence,” and the pile of corpses and dismembered bodies, whose perpetrators were walking around scot-free, showed that Johnson had misrepresented what Southern courts were in fact designed to do: provide legal cover for terror.78 A second function came into sharper focus with the ramping up of an expanded and aggressive penal system reconfigured to capitalize on the economic potential of the recently emancipated and newly imprisoned.79 In effect, Southern courts transferred full control of black people from the plantation owner to a carceral state.80 The instrument of re-enslavement was a brutal deployment of sheriffs, judges, and hard-labor punishment for black-only offenses such as carrying a firearm, making an insulting gesture, or stealing a pig. African Americans were then swept into the prison system to have their labor fill the coffers of the state and line the pockets of the plantation, mine, and lumber mill owners.81
In fact, the authors of the Black Codes crafted the South’s criminal justice system to enforce these brutal new laws to extract labor under the harshest conditions and provide wholly inadequate sustenance to the convicted. Those who died working the fields or in the mines could be easily replaced by more black bodies charged with vagrancy and handed a death sentence. As the flow of convict labor poured through the system, states either built or expanded the jurisdiction of their courts to handle the surge of cases.82 Justice, however, contrary to anything the president said, was never on the docket.
Education, as well, received the Johnson treatment, with the president voicing utter disbelief at the suggestion of the government building schools for blacks. To be sure, the South did not have a tradition of public schooling for anyone, least of all poor whites or blacks. The “planters believed that state government had no right to intervene in the education of children and, by extension, the larger social arrangement.” As in most oppressive societies, those in power knew that an educated population would only upset the political and economic order. Indeed, in the antebellum South, the enslaved were actively forbidden from learning to read and write. Many paid dearly for their literacy. One man “endured three brutal whippings to conceal his pursuit” of education. “In another instance a slave by the name of Scipio was put to death for teaching a slave child how to read and spell and the child was severely beaten to make him ‘forget what he had learned.’ ”83
The South’s defeat had little to no effect on that power dynamic. General Howard’s appointee in Louisiana warned him that whites had made clear tha
t all that stood between them and stripping blacks of any hope of land and education was a thin line of Union troops. Then he ominously added that if the soldiers were removed, black schools would be the first thing to vanish.84 Indeed, one Louisiana legislator, when first seeing a school opened by the Freedmen’s Bureau, exclaimed, “What? For niggers?”85 Johnson was right in line with these attitudes. If blacks wanted schools, the president was clear, they would have to build their own.
In fact, African Americans did not wait for Johnson’s blessing, let alone for government support or a white benefactor. One Freedmen’s Bureau official recorded, “Throughout the entire South … an effort is being made by the colored people to educate themselves.” He identified “at least 500 schools” built, staffed, and run by black people. In Georgia, for example, by the fall of 1866, African Americans “financed entirely or in part 96 of the 123 day and evening schools.” Harriet Beecher Stowe remarked, “They rushed not to the grog-shop but to the schoolroom—they cried for the spelling-book as bread, and pleaded for teachers as a necessity of life.”86
White Rage Page 3