Capitol Men

by Philip Dray

  In the spring of 1864 he was ordered to sail the Planter to a shipyard in Philadelphia for repairs; when the work on the boat stretched from weeks into months, Smalls made himself at home in the northern city. Charlotte Forten, a black Philadelphian working as a teacher in the Sea Islands, had written letters of introduction for him to the city's substantial abolitionist community. Smalls busied himself by monitoring work on the Planter and raising money to assist the freedmen at Port Royal.

  One day in December, Smalls and a black acquaintance were walking back to town from the shipyard when, to escape a sudden downpour, they boarded an empty streetcar. A few minutes later two white men got on, and the conductor told the blacks to leave their seats and go stand on the car's rear platform. Smalls refused. When the conductor insisted, he and his companion got off the car. Smalls was inclined to forget the incident, but the local press learned of it and denounced the fact that "a war hero who had run a rebel vessel out of Charleston and given it to the Union fleet ... was recently put out of a Thirteenth Street car." Broadsides went up, and a committee of Quakers announced a boycott of the streetcars, vowing to no longer allow a practice by which decent "colored men, women, and children are refused admittance to the cars," while "the worst class of whites may ride." At a spirited mass meeting, concerned Philadelphians were addressed by local luminaries including financier Jay Cooke and locomotive manufacturer Matthias W. Baldwin. In the face of such aroused sentiment, the city's streetcar lines capitulated, the protest helping to inspire the state legislature to ultimately ban discrimination in public transportation throughout Pennsylvania.

  That same year Smalls went to Baltimore to join a delegation of black South Carolinians at the Republican National Convention. The group was neither seated nor recognized by the chair, but they made history by formally petitioning the party to include black enfranchisement in its platform. At the time, with emancipation itself a recent development, the request by Smalls and his colleagues for the vote was not likely to get a hearing, even if their presence had been formally acknowledged; however, it was said that the black delegation from the secessionist state of South Carolina was the convention's chief curiosity.

  At war's end, Smalls had a place of prominence at the April 14, 1865, celebration in Charleston, marking the anniversary of the firing on Fort Sumter. The ceremonial centerpiece of the day-long event was the hoisting of the Stars and Stripes over the fort by Major General Robert Anderson, the Union officer who had been forced to surrender it in 1861. The Carolina spring day was by all accounts most accommodating, the air "spiced with the aroma of flowers and freighted with the melody of birds, all guiltless of secession, and warbling their welcome." Men, women, and children filled the sidewalks and plazas, waving tiny flags and trying to catch a glimpse of the celebration in the harbor, where hundreds of festooned boats sounded their horns and bells and dispatched fireworks into the sky. On cue, as the American flag rose to its perch above the fort, all the guns in the harbor and those on shore fired a deafening salute.

  The abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and Henry Ward Beecher were among those who had traveled from Boston and New York to witness the ceremony. Garrison was the editor of the Liberator, the nation's most ardent abolitionist publication, and a founder, along with his fellow Bostonian Phillips, of the influential American Anti-Slavery Society. Beecher, the brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, occupied the most famous pulpit in the country at Brooklyn's Plymouth Church. This was a day of tremendous vindication for these men and their principled fight against slavery. The abolitionists had been abused for three decades, criticized as hateful agitators, and worse; Garrison had been stripped of his clothes by a Boston mob and almost hanged; Phillips had nearly been killed at a public meeting in Cincinnati by a boulder hurled down from a balcony.

  THE RAISING OF THE FLAG AT FORT SUMTER

  The freed people of Charleston rewarded their travails with a warm welcome. At a mass rally in Citadel Square, the diminutive Garrison was hoisted up into the air to seemingly float on a sea of smiling black faces. In a formal presentation, a speaker assured him that the "pulsations" of the hearts of the black people gathered "are unimaginable. The greeting they would give you, sir, it is almost impossible for me to express; but simply, sir, we welcome and look upon you as our savior." Garrison, equally moved, replied,

  It is not on account of your complexion or race ... that I espoused your cause, but because you were the children of a common Father, created in the same divine image, having the same inalienable rights, and as much entitled to liberty as the proudest slaveholder that ever walked the earth ... While God gives me reason and strength, I shall demand for you everything I claim for the whitest of the white in this country.

  THE RUINS OF CHARLESTON

  Both Robert Smalls and his now equally famous boat were also objects of interest to the crowd along the waterfront; Smalls posed gallantly atop the Planter's wheelhouse as visitors swarmed over its decks. An American flag was run up the boat's rigging to coincide with the flag raising at Sumter, and as it inched its way to the top, the crowd on the decks below followed its progress with a mounting cheer, until the pennant finally attained the pinnacle, to great applause. "Tears of gladness filled every eye," it was said, "and flowed down cheeks unused to weeping." Even Smalls succumbed to the moment, clumsily backing the Planter into another ship loaded with Union dignitaries.

  The splendor of the April 14 jubilee in Charleston would glitter all the more in the memory of those who had attended because of the grim event that occurred that very night in Washington: the assassination of President Lincoln at Ford's Theatre. While it was not entirely clear what steps Lincoln would have taken to reintegrate the South into the Union, his sudden disappearance at a moment of such profound need could only deepen the country's uncertainty. Immense challenges lay ahead, nowhere more visibly than in South Carolina. Of 146,000 white males residing in South Carolina in 1860, 40,000 had been killed or seriously wounded in the war. Charleston itself, South Carolina's chief commercial port, had endured heavy Union naval shelling; of its five thousand houses, fifteen hundred had been destroyed and many others badly damaged. Much business property had been confiscated or was now worthless. "Of all the states overwhelmed by the rebellion, none lies so terribly mangled and so utterly exhausted as its prime mover, South Carolina," observed the New York Times, reminding readers that South Carolina was the birthplace of secession and that "its people have been longer and more virulently alienated from the National Government than those of any other state."

  Perhaps of even deeper significance than the physical damage was the sudden shift in the legal status of the bulk of South Carolina's residents: approximately 400,000 slaves, contrasted with a white population of less than 300,000, were now free. Politically, as well as socially, such demographics represented seismic change, auguring a future that few could imagine. Robert Smalls was destined to play a central role in this unprecedented transition, which was already being referred to by the not-yet-familiar term "Reconstruction."

  Chapter 2

  A NEW KIND OF NATION

  VICE PRESIDENT ANDREW JOHNSON of Tennessee, who assumed the presidency upon Lincoln's death, was a man of humble origins, a former small-town tailor turned politician and U.S. senator who was added to Lincoln's ticket in 1864 to help the administration reach out to Southerners after the war. He held the South's wealthy planter class responsible for secession and initially viewed the postwar period as a time when his people —small farmers, workers, artisans, and merchants—might earn a greater share of the region's leadership. But though he was loyal to the Union and accepted emancipation, the new president differed markedly from men like Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts and Congressman Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, Republicans known as Radicals for their strong views. They saw the South as a conquered foe and called for far-reaching changes in its society and harsh measures for dealing with leading Confederates.
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  Given that the country was emerging from the trauma of a devastating civil war, the ascent of a man like Johnson after a genial intellect like Lincoln struck the Radicals as tragically unfortunate, for in personal style the new chief executive was a stubborn loner never adept at conciliatory politics. When the need for national healing and inspired leadership could not have been more acute, America was bequeathed not a Washington or a Jefferson, but a man who was not supposed to be president.

  Even if questions about his character had not arisen, Johnson's reading of the times was to prove errant, and events would soon conspire to make his policies appear inadequate. Trying but failing to grasp the country's mood after four years of strife, he took actions that revealed again and again how hungry the nation was for the kind of leadership he could not deliver—leadership that would project compassion for the freedmen, toughness toward the ex-rebels, and a compelling vision of how the Union might be reestablished. The Radical-led Congress soon became convinced that it, not the president, bore the responsibility for shaping Reconstruction, and its members challenged Johnson at every turn. They overrode his vetoes and passed specific legislation, the Tenure of Office Act, to keep him from forcing from his cabinet those members sympathetic to Congress's views; the act proved a fatal trap for the president; his violation of it in 1868 led to his impeachment.

  Johnson had been under a cloud ever since he was sworn in as vice president in March 1864, when he had appeared inebriated at the ceremony. His defenders said that he had been feeling unwell and had swallowed a few glasses of brandy as a pick-me-up. Lincoln, who had heard stories of this intemperance when Johnson served in the Senate, had taken the precaution of sending an aide to Nashville to check up on him before selecting him as his running mate. "I have known Andy Johnson for many years," the president said after the swearing-in. "He made a bad slip the other day, but you need not be scared. Andy ain't a drunkard." Yet despite Lincoln's confidence, Johnson's lack of fitness for high office was a concern in Washington even before he assumed the mantle of the presidency.

  Johnson appeared to view the war as a kind of sibling rivalry gone bad, and he acted on the belief that retribution and further animosity between the sections would only impede a return to normalcy. Where the Radicals sought to strengthen federal authority, Johnson opposed them, concerned that the states, if stripped of their autonomy, would atrophy and become "mere satellites of an inferior character, revolving around the great central power." The former slaves he considered basically helpless. Docile, inclined to inertia, they would require guidance and restrictions imposed by whites. Southern society would demand this—having long regarded free black people as dangerous, whites understandably were alarmed by the sudden mobility of the former slaves.

  The result was the Black Codes, a system of laws enacted first in Mississippi in November 1865, then in various forms across the South, giving whites what amounted to police powers over the freed people. These new controls enforced labor contracts, kept blacks from accepting better-paying work of their own choosing, and allowed authorities to put "vagrants"—anyone without a fixed abode—to work in the fields or on municipal projects such as road building. Orphans could be compelled into apprenticeships or made to work as house servants. These statutes, "little more than warmed-over slavery," established curfews, prohibited blacks from joining militias, and attempted to govern their private conduct with rules for everything from gun ownership to the use of draft animals.

  At first this state of affairs seemed unavoidable. Few people, North or South, imagined that emancipation would entail placing blacks on the same legal plane with whites, and to many observers, the sudden freeing of an unlettered people held so long in bondage looked chaotic, even unsafe. Many Southerners, explained a Northerner living in North Carolina, regarded emancipation as a momentary error, a mistake made in haste, the "temporary triumph of fanaticism over divine truth," which would of necessity be corrected.

  Some blacks indeed paid dearly for believing the "delusion" that they were now free. "I met four white men about six miles south of Keachie, De Soto Parish," recalled Henry Adams of Louisiana.

  One of them asked me who I belonged to. I told him no one. So him and two others struck me with a stick and told me they were going to kill me and every other Negro who told them that they did not belong to anyone. One of [the whites] who knew me told the others, "Let Henry alone for he is a hard-working nigger and a good nigger." They left me and I then went on ... I have seen over twelve colored men and women, beat, shot and hung between there and Shreveport.

  The Black Codes, in the end, were likely more offensive than effective; blacks themselves resisted compliance, and federal officers in the conquered South frequently prevented their enforcement. The codes were, however, an accurate gauge of Southern white sentiment and an early sign of the region's will to defy the results of the war.

  In Washington, meanwhile, Republicans had grown concerned during the first eight months of Johnson's presidency as he moved to restore the Confederate states to the Union. He pardoned many rebel leaders, appointed Southern men to positions of authority, and ordered that state constitutional conventions be held; often their delegates consisted of former secessionists. When Congress reconvened in December 1865, Republicans called for the dismantling of Johnson's "reconstructed" Southern states and the creation of new state governments in which freedmen would vote and could be elected as representatives of their people. They turned away from Congress's door those Southern Democratic representatives who had been sent to Washington under Johnson's plan.

  The bipartisan Congressional Joint Committee of Fifteen was convened to weigh the challenge of Reconstruction—a term that had emerged toward the end of the war and referred to the imperative of restoring the fractured nation, as well as the numerous measures and conditions that would require. The committee was the idea of, and under the control of, Thaddeus Stevens, and despite its alleged bipartisan character it had only three Democratic members. Much of the extensive testimony it heard from 144 witnesses familiar with conditions in the postwar South—including the nurse Clara Barton and the cavalry officer George Armstrong Custer—confirmed the Radicals' suspicion that the rebel spirit had not really been destroyed. Upon deliberating, the group rejected President Johnson's argument that the Southern states were ready to be readmitted to the Union; but the members also spurned a Radical proposal that the states of the Confederacy, having forfeited their rights to sovereignty, should remain under long-term congressional control. The committee, as the historian David Donald explains, came to favor a proposal made by jurist Richard Henry Dana Jr., the so-called "grasp of war" theory, which suggested that Washington use the present, relatively adaptable circumstances of the war's aftermath to "act swiftly to revive state governments in this region and to restore promptly the constitutional balance between state and federal authority."

  In early 1866 the committee recommended the passage of two bills—an extension of the Freedmen's Bureau (officially titled the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands), which Lincoln had brought into existence in March 1865 to offer physical aid to war refugees and help establish equitable labor agreements between blacks and their former masters; and the Civil Rights Bill, which would undo the nefarious Black Codes and counter the much-lamented 1857 Supreme Court decision in Scott v. Sandford, better known as the Dred Scott case, which had denied that black people, slave or free, had standing as American citizens. The Civil Rights Bill, referring to the "fundamental rights belonging to every man as a free man," stated that all citizens and their property were entitled to equal protection under the law and that blacks were empowered to make their own labor contracts and initiate lawsuits. The president vetoed both bills, prompting the political cartoonist Thomas Nast, an ardent New York Republican of German descent who drew for Harper's Weekly, to depict an ornery Andrew Johnson kicking a chest of drawers containing terrified freed people—the Freedmen's "bureau"—down a flight of stairs.

/>   CARTOON SPOOFING PRESIDENT ANDREW JOHNSON'S TREATMENT OF THE FREEDMEN'S BUREAU, BY THOMAS NAST

  That April, the Civil Rights Bill was passed despite Johnson's refusal to sign it, the first time in American history that Congress overrode a presidential veto. Recognizing that Johnson and his states-rights orientation would be more hindrance than help, Congress moved ahead without him and in June proposed the Fourteenth Amendment, which would guarantee the provisions of the Civil Rights Bill and make the federal government the ultimate protector of equal rights and citizenship. The Fourteenth is considered one of the most revolutionary amendments in our Constitution's history, for it redefined notions of individual rights and the balance of states' rights versus federal authority by making personal liberty and equality federal guarantees, while empowering the national government to curtail state actions that deprived citizens of these rights.

  If Northerners wondered how well the South would comply with these congressional actions, the answer came swiftly. In May, street fighting broke out in Memphis, the culmination of long-simmering tension between white police officers and black soldiers, who had been interfering with arrests of black citizens there. When the troops fired their pistols into the air to keep police from taking a disorderly black man into custody, the police shot back, setting in motion a two-day assault on a black community swollen with war refugees. The so-called Memphis Race Riot, really a massacre of blacks by infuriated white police officers and mobs, killed nearly fifty black men, women, and children, and two whites, and numerous homes, churches, schools, and businesses were looted or set afire.

  Even more potent in its effect on Northern opinion was another "riot" in New Orleans, which occurred at the end of July. This city had long seemed a promising one for advances in race relations and the empowerment of black citizens. President Lincoln had begun to view it as "reconstructable" as early as May 1, 1862, when Union army troops, under General Benjamin Butler, took control of the city after Admiral David Farragut completed a successful assault from the sea. Because a substantial Unionist element resided in New Orleans, the president in December 1863 suggested that a form of local reconstruction be started there, based on his Ten Percent Plan. Under this plan, if 10 percent of the men who had voted in the election of 1860 would take an oath of allegiance to the United States, they would be allowed to form a new state government. Subsequently, a state constitutional convention was planned for 1864 to demonstrate Louisiana's willingess to rejoin the Union.