From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend

by Priscilla Murolo

  For the most part, however, Northern workers supported the war; and their determination to see it through often grew deeper and stronger after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued in January 1863. Pro-war Republicans swept most local elections in the fall of that year. Their success at the polls is largely attributable to the fact that the Union Army was scoring significant victories once black men were allowed to enlist. Union victories also grew more politically inspiring now that the U.S. Army was an army of liberation.

  As pro-war sentiment swelled, so did active opposition to slavery. This was partly in recognition of the African Americans’ crucial contributions to the Union’s war but also a result of abolitionists’ increased activity following the Emancipation Proclamation. Now that one of the Union’s official aims was to dismantle slavery in the Confederacy, slavery’s very heart, abolitionists became the most ardent war supporters. They took the lead in organizing a giant network of Loyal Leagues, Union Leagues, and Equal Rights Leagues that coordinated and linked pro-war and anti-slavery agitation in both black and white communities. Abolitionist agitation persuaded the “loyal” slave-holding states of West Virginia, Maryland, and Missouri to adopt antislavery constitutions. Petitions calling for a new, anti-slavery amendment to the U.S. Constitution flooded into Congress. Lincoln won re-election in fall 1864 on a platform that endorsed such an amendment and uncompromising prosecution of the war. On the last day of January 1865, Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment and sent it to the states for ratification. In March Congress established the Bureau of Freedmen, Refugees, and Abandoned Lands (known as the Freedmen’s Bureau) to coordinate protection and services for freed slaves and to redistribute confiscated land.

  That April the Confederacy collapsed like a house of cards. The Thirteenth Amendment, outlawing slavery everywhere in the United States, meanwhile moved inexorably toward ratification. On December 18, 1865, it was added to the Constitution, and slavery was entirely banished from U.S. soil. (By then only Kentucky and Delaware had not yet already abolished slavery.) Though everyone who backed the Union’s war contributed to this revolutionary advance, it originated in the wartime actions of slaves themselves.

  Much remained to be done. Returning north from her service in South Carolina, Harriet Tubman was forcibly removed from a passenger train car by the conductor and three other white men, who refused to recognize her military pass. She rode from Virginia to New York City in a baggage car.* And throughout the Union outside New England, black veterans returned to states where they could not vote. A convention of veterans from Iowa’s Sixtieth U.S. Colored Infantry declared in October 1865, “that he who is worthy to be trusted with the musket can and ought to be trusted with the ballot.”

  SOUTHERN RECONSTRUCTION AND COUNTERREVOLUTION

  The Confederacy’s defeat raised two key questions. On what terms would the rebel states be readmitted to the Union? What would happen to the 4 million African Americans who had been slaves when the war began? The answers were related.

  The Southern world had turned upside down. News of the Confederacy’s surrender set off celebrations throughout the South. When the news came to a Mississippi slave woman in a field,

  Caddy threw down her hoe, she marched herself up to the big house, then, she looked around and found the mistress. She went over to the mistress, she flipped up her dress, and told the white woman to do something. She said it mean and ugly. This is what she said: “Kiss my ass!”

  But the old order did not disappear. Andrew Johnson, the Tennessean who became the president after Lincoln’s assassination on April 14, 1865, sought quick reconciliation. He pardoned most of the rebels, and put them in charge of reconstructing state governments. He directed that the vast tracts of lands seized by the Union army be returned to their old owners. He asked only that the rebel states ratify the Thirteenth Amendment and repudiate the Confederate debt to earn readmission to the Union. White southern leaders moved quickly. They drafted state constitutions incorporating Black Codes, which denied black men the right to vote and hold office, excluded black children from public schools, and imposed harsh labor laws designed to keep ex-slaves at work. Under the Black Codes, for instance, freedpeople could be charged with vagrancy if they did not sign year-long labor contracts with white employers. By December 1865, ten of the former Confederate states (all but Texas) had met the president’s requirements for readmission.

  Freedpeople made the best they could of their limited liberty. They reunited with family members sold away under slavery. They moved to cities to find alternatives to plantation labor. They organized to improve their conditions of work: on the New Orleans levees, black and white workers together struck for higher wages (though the whites demanded and got more). They sent their children to the “freedmen’s schools” set up by the federal government. Some managed to get farms of their own, often purchased with the discharge bonuses received by Union army veterans. They petitioned Congress for equal rights as citizens.

  Violence against freedpeople had become widespread—beyond the many individual beatings and murders, there were mass slaughters. In Memphis, Tennessee, on May 1–3, 1866, forty-six blacks (mostly Union veterans) and two whites were killed by mobs who also torched much of the black community and raped several black women. A white mob rioted in New Orleans on July 30, killing at least thirty-five blacks and injuring more than a hundred others. Both riots were suppressed by federal troops, not local police.

  Congressional Republicans had had enough. “Radical” Republicans supported black equality under the law and opposed negotiations with former rebels. Moderate Republicans feared Democratic challenges to protective tariffs and possible moves to default on the war debt (owed to Northern financiers), and hoped to maintain Republican control of the government with black Southern votes. In June 1866, Congress refused to seat the newly-elected Southern delegates.

  Reconstruction stalled. Congress failed to override Johnson’s veto of an act establishing military courts to prosecute the multitudes of civil rights violations. But Congress did override another veto to pass a Civil Rights Act (1866) that entitled all Americans except Indians to the “full and equal benefit” of citizenship without regard to race. Congress also passed the Fourteenth Amendment, which prohibited states from violating any citizen’s rights or failing to give every citizen “equal protection” under the law. The Civil Rights Act was routinely ignored; the Amendment failed to win ratification, rejected by every state legislature from the former Confederacy, except Tennessee.

  On March 2,1867, over another presidential veto, Congress passed a new Reconstruction Act. The ten former Confederate states that had rejected the Fourteenth Amendment came under martial law. To rejoin the Union, these states were now required to allow black men to vote and hold office, to exclude former Confederate officials from voting and holding office, and to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment. About 1.3 million men became eligible to vote, about 700,000 of them African Americans. The first elections held under Radical Reconstruction chose delegates to constitutional conventions that overhauled the state governments between 1867 and 1869.

  The new state governments were the most democratic the South had ever known. Freedpeople poured tremendous energy into grassroots political organizing, sometimes in alliance with poor whites, often under the auspices of Union and Loyal Leagues, and Republican Clubs. In the lower South where black voters were often the majority, African American men were elected to local and state offices. Mississippi, Louisiana, and South Carolina sent black men to Congress. In the 1868 election, freedmen’s ballots provided the margin of victory for the Republican candidate, General Ulysses S. Grant.

  Reconstructed governments ratified the Fourteenth Amendment (adopted July 1868), and also the Fifteenth (adopted March 1870), which prohibited states from depriving citizens of voting rights “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” They eliminated all property requirements for voting and holding office. They rescinded the Black Codes. Th
ey recognized labor’s right to organize. They abolished imprisonment for debt. They built public hospitals, orphanages, and asylums. They created the South’s first free public school systems.

  Black workers organized to improve their wages and working conditions. In March 1866, field workers on a Louisiana plantation stopped work when the proprietor was late paying monthly wages. Black “washerwomen” (as they called themselves) in Jackson, Mississippi, announced on June 20 that year that they would no longer work for less than $1.50 a day. Black stevedores in Savannah, Georgia, went out on strike in February 1867, to protest a new municipal tax imposed on them. In April, black stevedores went on strike in Richmond, Virginia, and Mobile, Alabama.

  Radical Reconstruction had severe limitations. One was the failure to reconfiscate and redistribute the vast acres of farmland President Johnson had returned to the planters. Few freedpeople ever acquired their own farms: most became sharecroppers, sometimes on the same plantations where they had been enslaved, employed by the same men who had owned them before the war.

  Sharecropping rested on debt and credit. Contracts ran a calendar year, bound an entire family, provided a small monthly wage, and promised landlords a share (one-fourth to one-half) of the crop. On the annual “counting day,” the landlord first deducted various levies against the proceeds—payments for seed, tools, and draft animals supplied by the landlord, and for goods and supplies purchased on credit; fines for days missed for sickness, bad weather, or absence, and for disobedience or insubordination. After deductions, the worker’s share might amount to only a few dollars; sometimes the deductions were so large and the proceeds so small (from a poor crop, a fall in prices for agricultural commodities, or plain cheating) that the worker owed money to the landlord. A family that ended the year free and clear could look for a new contract with a new landlord, but families still in debt had to work another year. Sharecropper Henry Blake later recalled: “A man that didn’t know how to count would always lose. He might lose anyhow. The white folks didn’t give no itemized statement . . . you just had to take their word. . . . If you didn’t make no money, that’s all right; they would advance you more. But you better not try to leave and get caught. They’d keep you in debt.” For some families, “debt peonage” continued for generations.

  Other compromises were made. The public school systems, hospitals, asylums, and other institutions remained segregated. The color line in employment was not challenged: like their northern counterparts, southern blacks had fewer job opportunities than whites and earned lower wages for their work. Even education might not help: Women trained as school teachers often worked as laundresses or domestic servants, and men with college degrees had to settle for manual labor.

  Neither the Freedmen’s Bureau nor the U.S. Army could stop the violence. Organizations like the Ku Klux Klan and the Knights of the White Camelia unleashed a wave of arson, beatings, rapes, and murders targeting the black community: political leaders and activists, school teachers, professionals like doctors and lawyers, independent farmers and small business people, and anyone who organized unions, strikes, or other labor actions.* But trouble came with little provocation: a Georgia witness to a Congressional committee testified about sharecroppers in the early 1870s that

  Just about the time they got done laying by their crops, the Ku-Klux would be brought in upon them, and they would be run off, so that [the planter] could take their crops.

  Violence became so common by the late 1860s that whole communities were “lying out” at night—sleeping in the fields and woods to avoid the nightriders.

  By 1870, every ex-Confederate state had been readmitted. An 1872 Amnesty Act restored electoral rights to most ex-Confederates. Following his reelection, President Grant appointed prominent white Southerners to federal jobs and pardoned Klansmen convicted of violating freedpeople’s civil rights. The Freedmen’s Bureau was dismantled. The planters and their allies went to work on the Radical governments. Conservative Democrats—sometimes in alliance with white Republicans—had come to power in most of the states where white voters were the majority (Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia by 1871); now the counterrevolution turned to states where black men formed substantial voting blocs. Combining terror campaigns to keep African Americans from voting with fraudulent electorial tallies when they did, Democrats came to power in Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Texas by 1875, and Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina in 1876.

  Freedpeople resisted heroically. Henry Adams—born a slave in Georgia in 1843, sold onto a plantation near Logansport, Louisiana, emancipated at the end of the war—served three years in the Union Army, where he learned to read and write. Discharged in September 1869, he settled in Shreveport, working as a rail-splitter, plantation manager, and faith healer. In 1870, he joined other black veterans to form “The Committee,” whose 500 members organized Republican Clubs, advised freedpeople of their legal rights, distributed ballots at elections, and investigated fraud at the polling places, swindles by landlords, and terrorist attacks. Adams became president of Shreveport’s Republican Club in 1874, and was fired from his plantation job. That year’s elections were accompanied by unprecedented “bulldozing”—assassinations, beatings, arson—and the Republican Clubs fell apart in the countryside. Adams and his Committee tried hard to rebuild the Clubs for the 1876 elections, but the local “White League” stepped up its terror, and the Democrats won easily. Though they knew about voter fraud and intimidation, federal officials did not intervene. The last Union occupation troops were withdrawn from South Carolina and Louisiana in April 1877.

  The Radical governments were replaced with regimes that legally subordinated African Americans and controlled their labor. They redirected funding away from public education and projects like poor relief. They stifled black political activity with terror and fraud, and drove many black officials from their positions—those who remained depended on white patronage. They passed statutes reminiscent of the postwar Black Codes, criminalizing unemployment (“vagrancy”) and quitting a job before the end of a contract. They developed extensive convict labor systems, leasing prisoners to work without pay for railroad, mining, and lumber companies. They refined sharecropping laws to make sure landlords, received their profits whether or not crops brought enough money to cover workers’ wages too.

  Many freedpeople abandoned any hope of building a decent life in the South and organized to leave for some other place, “where a man can enjoy his political opinions without being murdered.” Despite Klan opposition, organizations promoting black emigration sprang up all over the South. In 1877, Henry Adams’s Committee became the Colonization Council and held meetings throughout the region. The next year was worse. Fifty-nine African Americans—Adams among them—went to New Orleans to testify about the terror, then could not return home where the White League had marked them for murder. In the spring of 1879, 6,000 black people from Louisiana, Mississippi, and eastern Texas migrated to Kansas by riverboat, joined the next winter by 3,000 to 4,000 more from Texas who came by wagon or rail. “Exodusters” settled as farm laborers, railroad workers, miners, domestics, and laundresses—by 1880 about a third had acquired their own land. Adams himself remained in New Orleans advocating migration until at least 1884.

  Though the counterrevolution was aimed at freedpeople, it had a deleterious effect on all labor, not just in the South but in the nation as a whole. The de facto disenfranchisement of freedpeople—a large portion of working-class Americans—increased the employing classes’ edge in both regional and national politics. By giving American manufacturers a low-wage haven to run to, the repressive labor system of the “New South” would eventually discipline workers in other regions too.

  LABOR MOVEMENTS AND STRUGGLES

  As Reconstruction and counterrevolution wracked the South, labor struggles elsewhere in the country traced a parallel course. The war years themselves saw a wave of workplace organizing in Northern states as the economy boomed on war production and i
nflation hit rents and prices. Despite the occasional use of troops to break strikes against firms engaged in war-related production, wartime strikes for higher wages were often short and successful. Hundreds of local unions sprang up, citywide assemblies of local unions reappeared, and about a dozen “national” unions connected local assemblies in various cities. African Americans in Union states began to build a black labor movement: in 1862, black sailors in New York City formed the American Seaman’s Protective Association—the first seamen’s union in the United States.

  Peace permitted an even broader effort. At a mass meeting celebrating the Confederate surrender in April 1865, Boston workers approved this resolution:

  While we rejoice that the rebel aristocracy of the South has been crushed . . . we want it to be known that the workingmen of America will demand in the future a more equal share of the wealth their industry creates . . . and a more equal participation in the privileges and blessings of those free institutions defended by their manhood on many a bloody field of battle.

  But workers faced many obstacles. The postwar economy was unstable. Corruption flourished in government, nourished by profiteering in military procurement and land speculation, which mocked the Republican commitment to “Free Soil.”* Employers used imported contract labor (authorized by Congress in 1864) to replace strikers.

  Labor was itself divided, especially by widespread racial animosities, and organized actions often stopped at the color line. Some labor activists recognized the problem. The Boston Daily Evening Voice, founded in late 1864 by white printers fired for union activity, advocated labor solidarity across occupation and race. An editorial from October 15, 1865, shows a characteristic blend of principle and expediency:

  If we insist that employers are no better than we, we must not pretend to be better than others. If we claim justice, we must do justice. . . . The workingman’s success is simply impossible without united and harmonious action. If the machinist says to the wielder of the pick and shovel, I will not associate with you,—if you want better wages you must get it on your own hook; if the clerk says to the coal-heaver, between you and I there is a gulf fixed; or if the white man says to the black, I do not recognize you as a fellow workman; and these feelings prevail, there is the end of hope for the labor movement.