by Philip Dray
Reconstruction would be filled with examples of how the federal government backed away from its promises to the freedmen, but none may have been as heart-rending as the scene on Edisto Island in fall 1865 when the "Christian General" had to inform loyal blacks, gathered in a village church, that they would have to forfeit their claim to the land and strike labor contracts with their former owners. In the meeting's "noise and confusion," he recalled, "no progress was had till a sweet-voiced Negro woman began the hymn, 'Nobody knows the trouble I seen, nobody knows but Jesus...'"
The singing calmed the meeting, but when Howard began to address the assembled freed people, "their eyes flashed unpleasantly, and with one voice they cried, 'No, no!'...One very black man, thick set and strong, cried out from the gallery, 'Why, General Howard, why do you take away our lands? You take them from us who are true, always true to the government! You give them to our all-time enemies! That is not right!'"
After the first of the year, a newly arrived federal officer, General Daniel E. Sickles, ordered all freedmen to move off the property they held "illegitimately" or face immediate eviction. Some freedmen were able to hold on to their land if they had purchased it outright and held titles; others were offered less desirable sites possessed by the government. Robert Smalls was active in making these alternative lands available. But by and large, the dream of the forty-acre land plots had ended. Of the almost forty thousand freedmen who were settled on Sea Islands lands because of Field Order Number 15, only fifteen hundred were ultimately deemed to have valid titles.
Other opportunities did open up. In 1866 Congress passed the Southern Homestead Act, making forty-six million acres owned by the United States in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Mississippi, and Louisiana available in eighty-acre sites at a cost of $2.50 an acre. But much of the land was too expensive or too poor in quality, and freedmen lacked the capital to dredge, drain, or otherwise transform it into arable plots. Hopeful blacks who relocated with the idea of acquiring such property often were forced by economic necessity to accept labor contracts from nearby whites.
It was becoming increasingly clear that most of the desirable land in the South would remain in the hands of the landowning class that had held it previously. Many Northern Republicans felt that this repudiated the whole purpose of fighting and winning the Civil War. "Of what avail would be an act of Congress totally abolishing slavery, or an amendment to the Constitution forever prohibiting it, if the old agricultural basis of aristocratic power shall remain?" asked the Indiana congressman George W. Julian. "Real liberty must ever be an outlaw where one man only in three hundred or five hundred is an owner of the soil."
To Julian's colleague from Pennsylvania, Thaddeus Stevens, confiscation still seemed the best way to rectify this imbalance, for Stevens envisioned Reconstruction not as a time simply to patch and mend America but as an opportunity to perform reconstructive surgery. The chief of the House Radicals and perhaps the purest revolutionary of the postwar era, Stevens was an intimidating congressional leader. He moved awkwardly because of a clubfoot, a lifelong disability, and, robbed of his natural hair by a scalp infection, he wore an imposing wig, which accentuated the hatchet-sharp features of his face. The New York Herald called him "a strange and unearthly apparition—a reclused remonstrance from the tomb ... the very embodiment of fanaticism," but his friends claimed that his handicaps were the source of his hatred of all injustice. He had been in the forefront of many key advances of the era—the Confiscation Acts, the arming of black troops, and the enfranchisement of the freedmen. Some historians suggest that President Lincoln valued the prickly Stevens for his willingness to confront difficult issues head-on, in order that the president's own efforts, trailing just behind, might better appear conciliatory. Stevens was most widely known for his role in engineering the 1868 impeachment of Andrew Johnson, nominally for violating the Tenure of Office Act, but really for failing to lead a program of Reconstruction that was acceptable to Congress.
While the franchise was frequently cited as the key to establishing the freedmen in the South, Stevens feared that even with the vote, black Southerners without land would remain vassals; land confiscation would readjust the region's economy and labor practices while providing poetic justice for the slaves. In a speech in his hometown of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Stevens explained that if the land holdings of seventy thousand of the key rebels in the former Confederacy were confiscated, it would make enough acres available for redistribution to as many as one million freedmen, with plenty of land left over to be sold at $10 per acre both to blacks and also to poor whites. The latter deserved consideration, Stevens felt, because they had been buffaloed by the Southern aristocrats into fighting an un-winnable war. The income from these sales could pay down the national debt. To those who might question the wisdom of dispossessing the planters, Stevens insisted such a measure made more sense than cockeyed migration schemes to colonize in some foreign land four million black Americans "native to the soil and loyal to the government." Stevens had an ally in the Boston abolitionist Wendell Phillips, who believed "this nation owes the Negro not merely freedom; it owes him land," and that black Americans knew this best of all, for their "instincts are better than our laws." Phillips saw "what few public men in the America of his time appear to have realized," notes his biographer Ralph Korngold, "that economic power was the foundation of political power—that if the land remained in the hands of the planter aristocracy, it would be a question of time before they again ruled the South."
THADDEUS STEVENS
JOSEPH RAINEY
With the antagonisms of the war already fading, however, there was inadequate support in Congress for Stevens's confiscation program. Most Americans, including many Republicans, "believed that a free laborer, once accorded equality of opportunity, would rise or fall in the social scale on the strength of his own diligence, frugality, and hard work," the historian Eric Foner points out. "Confiscation seemed an unwarranted interference with the rights of property and an unacceptable example of special privilege and class legislation." Frederick Douglass could remind America that "when the serfs of Russia were emancipated, Tsar Alexander II saw to it that each received three acres of ground upon which they could live and make a living," but the taking of private property, even that of notorious rebels, somehow did not sit right with most of Douglass's countrymen.
Richard Cain of South Carolina was not ready to give up on the dream of land for former slaves. Even as he saw the efforts of the Freedmen's Bureau and the confiscation policies suggested in Congress fall from favor and eventually from consideration, he continued to hear his own followers' urgent plea— Land! —and sought ways to obtain it fairly.
By the time of South Carolina's constitutional convention in 1868, attempts to transfer land to freedmen had already accrued a lengthy and not very pleasant history. Therefore many delegates were inclined to view it as a dead issue. Joseph Rainey of coastal Georgetown won approval of a resolution aimed to prevent the subject from even being discussed:
That this Convention do hereby declare to the people of South Carolina, and to the world, that they have no land or lands at their disposal, and in order to disabuse the minds of all persons whatever throughout the State who may be expecting a distribution of land by the Government of the United States through the [Freedmen's Bureau], or in any other manner, that no act of confiscation has been passed by the Congress of the United States, and it is the belief of this Convention that there never will be, and that the only manner by which any land can be obtained by the landless will be to purchase it.
Rainey, a native South Carolinian, was a reliable spokesman for local black sentiment. His father had been a successful barber who had purchased his family's freedom, and Rainey, following the family trade, had become a barber at the Mills House, one of Charleston's finest hotels, where he may have himself briefly owned a slave. When war broke out, however, his skilled profession did not save him from being drafted for Confederate service—first he
lping to build harbor fortifications, later as a steward on a rebel vessel used for running arms and other goods through the offshore Union naval blockade. The blockade runners frequently put in at Bermuda or the Bahamas, where cargoes from big English ships were transferred to the Southern boats for the stealthy journey to the American coast. Rainey managed to bring his wife, Susan, along on one of these voyages, and the two jumped ship in Bermuda. Here Rainey resumed his peacetime vocation to wait out the war, offering "Hair-Cutting ... Executed in Artistic Style" in a shop near the waterfront, before returning to South Carolina in 1865.
Rainey's resolution was based on humane concern for the frustrations with land acquisition of South Carolina blacks, but Richard Cain's response was to demand a conversation on that very topic. Cain announced that he would offer a resolution to create a state land commission so that freedmen would be able to buy their own land, with the state serving as middleman in the transactions. Many owners of large properties were in disadvantageous financial straits, Cain said, and the planters could make good profits by culling small land parcels from their vast holdings and selling them. Cain believed the commission should be established with the help of the federal government and recommended that the convention petition Congress "to make an appropriation of one million dollars ... for the purpose of purchasing lands in this state ... and that said lands when so purchased shall be sold to the freedmen as homes, in parcels of 10, 20, 40, 50, 60, 80 and 100 acres ... under the supervision of [the] Commissioner of the Freedmen's Bureau." The land would also be available to interested whites. Cain suggested that the $1 million could take the form of a loan from the $7 million said to remain in the Freedmen's Bureau Fund; the loan would be paid back within five years with the income from the land purchases.
Several delegates denounced Cain for raising a proposal bound to give the freedmen false hope. The most animated was Charles P. Leslie, a white New Yorker who had initially come south as an employee of the U.S. Treasury Department and was now trying his hand at operating a plantation. Leslie warned that there was almost no chance Congress would make any such allocation and that after the earlier disappointments in the Sea Islands, it was cruel to dangle such unlikely dreams before the former slaves. "It is the fashion of bogus politicians to get up resolutions," he said, "but gentlemen here are tickling the fancy of the poor people of the state by petitions to Congress that every sensible person from the coast of Maine to the Gulf of Mexico well knows will not get a single dollar. I will not, for that reason, allow my name to be recorded in favor of fooling the people." He mocked Cain's faith in the bottomless largesse of the national Congress. "Suppose I should button up my coat and march up to your house and ask you for money or provisions, when you had none to give," he demanded. "What would you think of me?"
"You would do perfectly right to run the chance of getting something to eat," Cain replied. Leslie frowned, but Cain continued: "The abolition of slavery has thrown these people upon their own resources. How are they to live? I know the philosopher of the New York Tribune [Horace Greeley] says root, hog, or die ... My proposition is simply to give the hog some place to root."
Cain told the convention he regretted that his idea had generated such a caustic reaction.
When I, in the simplicity of my heart and with a fervent desire for good, snatched a few moments of my time between the hours of twelve at night and two in the morning, to pen the preamble and resolutions of the petition presented, I little thought there would be five persons on this floor who would object to so reasonable, so innocent an operation as simply requesting the Congress of the United States ... to appropriate ... money for the benefit of the black men and poor white men in this state, equally involved in a state of starvation.
He recounted the unfairness of the sharecropping system to which many blacks, unable to attain land, had been relegated.
After fifty men have gone on a plantation, worked the whole year at raising 20,000 bushels of rice, and then go to get their one-third, by the time they get through the division, after being charged by the landlord 25 or 30 cents a pound for bacon, two or three dollars for a pair of brogans that cost 60 cents ... two dollars a bushel of corn, that can be bought for one dollar ... after, I say, these people have worked the whole season ... they find themselves in debt.
He related how on a recent visit to a plantation, "I saw corn cribs piled with corn, and fodder houses filled with fodder. I went into the cabin of the negroes and found but a scanty morsel of corn dodger and a scanty ration of bacon."
In his view, the infusion of $1 million would have multiple effects. It would offer land and homes to the destitute, relieve the Freedmen's Bureau of caring for the needy, and enrich white landowners who were cash poor, thus invigorating the state economy. The bureau was already spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on the indigent, he pointed out; the same investment in homes and land would prove far more meaningful and would help improve the character and work ethic of the Southern Negro.
I believe if the same amount of money that has been employed by the Bureau in feeding lazy, worthless men and women, had been expended in purchasing lands, we would today have no need of the Bureau ... There are hundreds of persons in the jail and penitentiary cracking rock today who have all the instincts of honesty, and who, had they an opportunity of making a living, would never have been found in such a place.
Cain's emphatic rhetoric had its effect, and his measure passed the convention with substantial white support, although Robert Smalls, Robert Brown Elliott, and Joseph Rainey concurred with Leslie, opposing Cain on the grounds that it was irresponsible to set up South Carolina's black population for another crushing disappointment.
As Leslie and the others predicted, the land commission idea won no sympathy in Washington; a tersely worded telegram advised the convention that a $1 million loan was out of the question. But it remained popular enough with the delegates that they authored a constitutional provision ordering the state legislature to create such a body. Established in March 1869, the commission was to buy both existing farmland and undeveloped lands, divide the purchases into parcels of twenty-five to one hundred acres, and sell them at reasonable prices to citizens, with the stipulation that the purchase price be repaid within eight years. Settlers would pay only interest and taxes for the first three years and make payments toward the purchase price thereafter. Speculators would be discouraged by the requirement that purchasers begin cultivation within five years.
For reasons that are not entirely clear, Leslie, the harshest critic of Cain's plan, was put in charge of the land commission, perhaps as a means of ensuring the program would be kept under tough scrutiny. Cain was passed over, likely because he was regarded as gifted but eccentric, a man of God whose proclamations at the convention—such as a resolution denying the office of governor to anyone who refused to acknowledge the existence of a supreme being—often appeared softheaded. In any case his real authority lay with his congregation at the Emmanuel, and in his newspaper readership, a base of support that would eventually propel him to national office.
Chapter 4
"THE WHIRLIGIG OF TIME"
IN LATE JANUARY 1870 a tall, heavy-set man in his late forties, black but of light complexion, strode purposefully into the corridors of the U.S. Capitol. He wore white gloves, a dignified long black coat, and matching pants and vest, and he carried a dark walking stick. His home state, Mississippi, had recently held a constitutional convention similar to South Carolina's, and was in the process of gaining readmission to the Union. At the time (and until 1913), U.S. senators were not popularly elected but were selected by the state legislature. When Mississippi's had convened, its black members had demanded that one of the state's three open Senate terms go to a black man. Now Hiram Rhodes Revels, a minister and the state's newly appointed senator, had arrived to claim his seat.
Would Congress accept this "Fifteenth Amendment in flesh and blood," as Wendell Phillips called him, an allusion to the amendment pass
ed by Congress in 1869 providing American citizens with the right to vote, regardless "of race, color, or previous condition of servitude"? Throughout the nation's history prior to emancipation there had been only two known elected black officeholders—the lawyer Macon Allen, who in 1848 won a position as a justice of the peace in Massachusetts, and John Mercer Langston, the great-uncle of the poet Langston Hughes, who in 1855 became a township clerk in Ohio. As recently as 1869 J. Willis Menard, a black Louisianian elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, had been sent home by that body, which refused to acknowledge his election as legitimate.
Two factors made Hiram Revels especially interesting to the Washington establishment. The first was that he had come to "replace" none other than Jefferson Davis, who in 1861 had resigned his Senate seat to become president of the Confederacy, exclaiming, "The time for compromise has passed, and those who oppose us will smell powder and feel Southern steel." Such a stunning reversal of fortune—black men assuming the places of authority previously held by the leading Confederates—was both meaningful and dramatic; as the black educator and missionary Charlotte Forten noted, "The 'whirligig of time' has brought about its revenges." The other was that Revels was known for speaking his mind; those who knew him said that since he had never been a slave, he lacked the habit of deference to whites. "The Senator-elect ... has a benevolent expression, a pleasant, impressive voice, and speaks with directness, as one thoroughly convinced of the views entertained," marveled one observer, while the New York Herald noted, "The distinguished darky made quite a sensation" huddling with one of his chief white supporters, Senator Sumner of Massachusetts, the two men "thus practically illustrating the idea of political and social equality." "Happy Revels" crowed another account. "He is of popular manners and speaks with great ease, fluency, and generally in good taste. In his intercourse with all classes he conducts himself with decorousness."