RECONSTRUCTION: THE WORKING OUT
So the North turned cheerfully to its own affairs--and very engrossing
affairs they were--and the South faced its new conditions. It was still
struggling with the economic wreckage left by four years of battle,
invasion and defeat. It had borne the loss of its separate nationality
and the flag endeared by countless sacrifices. It had accepted the
sudden emancipation of its servile class by the conqueror's hand. It had
been encouraged by President Johnson to resume with little change its
old ways of government. For two years it had gone along precariously
with State organizations of the earlier pattern, subject to occasional
interruption by military authority or officials of the Freedmen's
Bureau. Then, in 1867, all State governments were set aside, and
military rule pure and simple held the field,--in most States for about
fifteen months; in Mississippi, Texas and Virginia, by their own choice,
for as much longer. Though as it was generally administered the military
government was just, as well as economical, yet its maintenance was a
bitter ordeal for a people with the American political habit; a people,
too, who had fought gallantly for four years; who had, upon accepting
their defeat, been assured that the object of their conqueror was
attained in restoring them to their old position, except for
emancipation of the slaves; and who now for a year or two longer were
held under martial law.
At last--for most of them in mid-summer of 1868--they were again
restored to self-government of the American pattern. Self-government
for all, thought the North complacently; whites and blacks were equal,
not only as subjects of the law but as makers of the law; and so freedom
and democracy were established. But the Southern whites asked in dismay,
What kind of fellow-lawmakers have we got? The question answered itself.
The million or so of new voters were most of them ignorant in a sense of
which illiteracy gives but a hint. They were unversed even in genuine
family life; skilled only in manual industry; unpracticed in
citizenship; utterly untaught in the principles, the facts of history,
the theory and art of self-government, which make up the proper
equipment of the voter. A great part of them, field hands on the great
cotton and sugar plantations, were rude and degraded, trained to live
solely under close and constant control.
How were the whites to deal with these new-made voters? From the
standpoint of expediency, three courses offered,--to conciliate and
educate them; to outvote them by massing the whites together; or to
suppress them by force or fraud. From the standpoint of unregenerate
human nature, the whites as a body at first took none of these
courses,--they stood apart from the whole business of politics, in wrath
and scorn. Unregenerate perhaps, but most natural, most human! At first,
some crude policy mingled with the sentiment that kept them aloof; there
was the hope that if the whites generally abstained from voting, at the
elections held in November, 1867, to pass on the question whether to
hold constitutional conventions, the proposal might fail for want of the
requisite majority of the registered voters. It was a fallacious hope;
suppose the conventions were to fail, what better terms were now to be
expected from Congress? But the conventions were all held; and as in the
same spirit most of the whites refused to vote for delegates, these were
chosen from the negroes, their friends from the North, and the few
Southern whites who accepted the inevitable.
Is it not the wisest, the manliest course, to accept the inevitable? So
asked General Longstreet, in a letter to a friend, June 3, 1867. He had
just listened to Senator Wilson, and had been surprised by his fairness
and frankness. For himself he says, "I will be happy to work in any
harness that promises relief to our discomfited people, whether bearing
the mantle of Mr. Davis or Mr. Sumner." Negro suffrage is for the
present an established fact; if after a fair trial it works
disastrously, we will appeal to Congress to repeal it. "If every one
will meet the crisis with proper appreciation of our condition and
obligations, the sun will rise to-morrow on a happy people." But his
words fell on deaf ears, and when he acted with the Republicans he was
visited with ostracism, denunciation, and attack upon his war record.
The typical attitude, at first, was that of the planter who, after
listening to a discussion of the final reconstruction act, inquired,
"Does it say anything about raising cotton?" "No." "Then, damn Congress
and its laws! I'm going to raise cotton." So he and a good many others
gave themselves to raising cotton, and for a while left the choice of
State officers and legislators to "niggers," "carpet-baggers," and
"scalawags." A "scalawag" was any Southern white who allied himself
politically with the negroes, and a "carpet-bagger" was a Northern
adventurer, for whose worldly goods a gripsack sufficed,--or, in
general, any Northerner whatever.
For the blacks, the sudden opening of political power and preferment,
however designed, was in effect a very doubtful benefit. It turned their
hopes and aspirations in a way which was really "no thoroughfare." To
the more promising and ambitious it offered sudden and brilliant prizes,
instead of the patient apprenticeship which they needed. Of those who
quickly rose to office, a few were by character and attainments really
fit for their position; many won favor by shallow arts; and others were
thrown up like driftwood by the tide. The negroes as a body could follow
only a personal leadership,--how many whites, North or South, really
follow any other?--could be organized in bodies, attached to a party
name and watchwords, and voted in mass by the men who had their
confidence. They understood that their freedom and their right to vote
had been given them by the North and by the Republican party, and to
that party they naturally turned. Their old masters--in many cases their
best friends--frankly told them they were unfit to vote, and wanted no
dealings with them in political affairs. So they found leadership
principally in the men who had come from the North.
There was a Northern immigration which may be classified as business
men, teachers and adventurers. A considerable number sought an
opportunity in reviving and developing industry,--substantial men and
good citizens. Sometimes a patriotic motive mingled with the industrial.
Governor Andrew, on retiring to private life as a lawyer, tried for some
time to advance a company for bringing into conjunction Southern lands
and Northern enterprise and capital. There were various projects of this
kind, but they met with little success. Private individuals, however,
added something to the industrial and civic forces of the South. A
larger class were the teachers. Men and women by hundreds went to the
South, some sent by missionary organizations, some independently, to
organize schools and to teach the children of the freedmen. Many of them
were of the highest character, devoted, self-sacrificing, going to the
blacks simply because they supposed their need was greatest. But
Beecher's warning proved sound--because as a whole this movement took
the negroes as a distinct field, ignoring the needs of the whites, it
incurred odium as an alien and half-hostile work. The barbaric element
among the whites--and slavery had left a deep taint of barbarism--came
out at its worst in insults to the "nigger teachers," with occasional
burning of a school-house. The better social elements looked askance at
those whose presence was a reminder of conquest and humiliation.
From the business and the educational immigration, a few Northern men
were drawn into public affairs, less by choice than by necessity of the
situation. With these mingled a different class, men who had been
disreputable hangers-on of the army or the Freedmen's Bureau, or who had
come for the sole purpose of plunder. It was a very mixed company of
whites and blacks that made up the conventions and then filled the
legislative halls and the public offices. The constitutions were not
badly framed, except as they, for the most part, continued the exclusive
clauses. The general legislation was various in its character. There
were some excellent features, above all the institution in every State
of a genuine public school system, where before there had been only
makeshifts or make-believes. Some other good constructive work was done,
toward establishing society on the new basis. Certainly nothing was
enacted so bad as the "black codes" of a few years earlier, not to speak
of the legislation under slavery. There were some unsuccessful attempts
at engrafting institutions, like the township system, which had worked
well in their native soil but could not be created out of hand. In
general the white leadership of the dominant party averted much that
might have been expected from the ignorance of its legislators as a
mass. But plenty of waste and mischief was wrought. Place a crowd of
hungry and untaught men next the public treasury with the lid off, and
some results are sure. The men will not be safer guardians of the
treasure for having had for most of their lives no property rights of
their own, not even the ownership of their own souls and bodies. Yet
most of the plunder seems to have gone into the pockets of knaves of the
superior race. There was a degree of extravagance, waste and corruption,
varying greatly with localities and times, but sufficient to leave a
permanent discredit on the Southern Republican governments as a class.
To judge accurately of the merits and demerits of these governments is
perhaps as difficult a task as historian ever undertook. So fierce is
the passion which invests these events in the memory of the present
generation, that it is almost hopeless to sift and adjudicate the sober
facts. Time has softened much; even the Civil War begins to stand forth
in some firmness of outline and clarity of atmosphere. But when we come
to reconstruction--grave historians grow almost hysterical, romancers
pass the bounds of possibilities, and even official figures contradict
one another with sublime effrontery.
Yet this very passion of remembrance, which in one way obscures, in
another way illuminates the historical situation. The grievance most
profoundly felt in the reconstruction period was not unwise laws nor
waste of public money nor oppressive taxes. It was the consciousness by
the master class of political subjection to the servile class. It was
the spectacle of rude blacks, yesterday picking cotton or driving mules,
sitting in the legislators' seats and executive offices of Richmond and
Columbia, holding places of power among the people of Lee and Calhoun.
Fancy the people of Massachusetts, were the state-house on Beacon hill
suddenly occupied by Italian, Polish and Russian laborers,--placed and
kept there by a foreign conqueror. Add to the comparison the prouder
height of the slaveholder, and the lower depth of his serf. Put this as
the case of a people high-strung and sensitive, still fresh from the
passion of war, still smarting from defeat. They had fought to
exhaustion, and their banner had fallen without disgrace. Now the
victors who had won by superiority of force had placed their late
bondmen as their rulers. The offices from which their own captains and
chiefs were shut out were filled by plantation field-hands.
It was not likely that the first attitude of scornful passivity would
long continue, and it did not. The warnings vainly uttered
beforehand,--that the natural leaders would surely lead, and had best be
won as allies, were proved right when it was too late. Said the
_Republican_, August 10, 1868, in protesting against the plan of the
party managers in organizing the Southern wing to consist mainly of the
blacks: "The Republican party cannot long maintain its supremacy at the
South by negro votes alone. The instincts of submission and dependence
in them and of domination in the whites, are too strong to permit such a
reversal of the familiar relations and the natural order. The
slave-holding element has learned to combine, conspire and command, in
the best school on earth, and they will certainly come to the top. Nor
is it desirable that such a state of things should continue."
The old official class being excluded--to the number, it was estimated,
of 160,000,--and the stand-aloof policy, or drift rather, prevailing in
the political field, it was the more lawless element that first began to
conspicuously assert the white supremacy. There grew up an organization
called "the Ku-Klux Klan," designed at first partly as a rough sport and
masquerade, partly to overawe the negroes. There were midnight ridings
in spectral disguises, warnings, alarms and presently whippings and even
murders. The society, or imitations of it, spread over most of the
South. It was at its height in 1868-70, and in the latter year it
gradually gave way, partly owing to vigorous measures ordered from
Washington, and partly perhaps as legitimate political combinations
again occupied the whites. But it is to be noted that throughout the
decade of reconstruction, though the present fashion is to lay exclusive
stress on the wrong-doing of the negroes and their friends, yet the
physical violence, frequent and widespread, was almost wholly practiced
by the whites.
From the political torpor, due to discouragement and resentment, there
was an early recovery. When it was found that cotton-planting pure and
simple, with ignoring of politics, resulted in heavy taxes for the
planter; when to the first numbness there succeeded the active
smart,--the whites betook themselves to the resource which in most
States soon proved adequate,--the ballot, and political combination. In
several States the whites were easily in the majority, and where they
were slightly outnumbered their superior intelligence soon gave them the
advantage. In Georgia, finally readmitted at the end of 1869, the
Democrats--constituting the great body of the whites--carried the
election in the next year, and remained in control of the State.
Virginia, which had advisedly kept under military rule until, with
President Grant's aid, she came in without the excluding clauses, early
in 1870, passed at once under Democratic rule. In the same year North
Carolina became Democratic. Texas and Arkansas remained under Republican
sway until the majority shifted to the Democrats in 1874. In Alabama,
the Democrats gained the Governorship and the lower House as early as
1870; two years later the result was disputed, the Democrats conceding
the Governor but claiming the Legislature, while the Republicans
organized a rival Legislature; the Republican Governor-elect called for
United States troops, which were promptly dispatched, and with their
backing a Republican Legislature was secured. In 1874 a Democratic
Governor and Legislature were chosen and installed without dispute. The
Federal interference in Alabama, and the experience of others of the
reconstructed States,--South Carolina, Mississippi, and
Louisiana,--recalls us to that phase of the history which deals with
Washington and the national government.
Through the eight years of Grant's administration, the public life of
the nation was concerned mainly with clearing away the wreckage left by
the war. There was an enormous debt to be handled and an inflated
currency to be reduced; there was to be curbed administrative
extravagance and corruption, bred of profuse expenditure; a bitter
quarrel with England was to be guided toward war or peace; and the
disordered South was to be composed. These tasks were encountered by men
whose habits and sentiments had been formed in a long and desperate
contest, and in an atmosphere slowly cooling from the fiery glow of
battle. The soldier had to beat his sword into a plowshare, and small
wonder if the blacksmithing was sometimes clumsy.
Grant was too completely a soldier to be changed into a statesman. He
could deal with a definite, limited, though gigantic business,--the
overcoming of the armies of the Confederacy. But it was beyond his power
to comprehend and master the manifold and intricate problems that center
in the Presidency. Given a specific, well-defined question, within the
reach of his sturdy sense and loyal purpose, and he could deal with it
to good effect, as he did with the English arbitration and the Inflation
bill. But he was incapable of far-reaching and constructive plans
carefully laid and patiently pursued. When he communicated to Congress
the adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment, he urged in wise and forcible
language that the new electorate could only be qualified through
education, and that to provide such education was a pressing duty of
Congress so far as its power extended, and of the people through all the
agencies it could command. But having once said this, he let the subject
drop. National education for the freedmen was left unnoticed, save by an
occasional lonely advocate like Sumner. Nor did President Grant take any
personal and positive measures to win and hold the old South to the new
order; he failed to invite and consult its representative men, he made
no journeys among the people.
In most matters of public policy, save in emergencies, Grant let matters
be shaped by the men whom he had taken into his counsel--in his official
Cabinet or the "kitchen cabinet"--and by the Republican leaders in
Congress, of whom the controlling group, especially in the Senate, were
in close touch with the White House. His affiliations were with men of
material power, men who had strongly administered civil or military
affairs, stout partisans, faithful friends and vigorous haters. His
tastes did not draw him to the idealists, the scholars, the reformers.
He was accessible to good fellowship, he was easily imposed on by men
who were seeking their own ends, and he was very slow to abandon any one
whom he had once trusted. Absolutely honest, the thieves stole all round
him. Magnanimous at heart, the bitter partisans often made him their
tool. Of the great questions of the time, the English quarrel was
brought to an admirable healing, under the management of the Secretary
of State, Hamilton Fish, in 1871, by the joint high commission, the
treaty of Washington, and the Geneva award. In the long contest for a
sound currency, the inflation policy received its death-blow by the
President's veto in 1874, and resumption was undertaken when Sherman
carried his bill through Congress in 1875. As to honesty of
administration, the president's good intentions were constantly baffled
through his misplaced and tenacious confidences. The vast expenditures
of the war, the cheating incident to its great contracts, the
speculation favored by a fluctuating currency, the huge enterprises
invited by the return of peace,--had infected private and public life
with a kind of fever; the treasury was an easy mark; and while the
people held to Grant for his personal honesty, and re-elected him, an
army of rogues throve under his lax administration.
The let-alone policy toward the South, to which Grant was prompted both
by his virtues and his limitations, would not on the whole have been
unacceptable to the mass of the Southern whites. Left wholly to
themselves, those States would soon have righted themselves from the
unstable equilibrium in which they had been placed by the imposition of
an ignorant electorate. Natural forces,--just or unjust, benignant or
cruel,--would soon have reversed the order. But the nation at large
would not at once abandon its protectorate over its recent wards, the
freedmen. For their greatest need, education, it assumed no
responsibility. But when stories were rife of abuse and terrorism under
the masquerade of the Ku-Klux, Congress interfered, even if by some
stretch of its constitutional power, to bring the raiders under the arm
of Federal law. When elections were reported to be controlled by fraud
and intimidation, it seemed incumbent on the national government to
protect the ballot-box by which its own members were chosen. When rival
bodies claimed each to be the legitimate government of a State, it was
necessary for the Washington authorities to decide which they would
recognize, and it was a natural sequence to back their decision by the
military force. And in all of these cases, the maintenance of law and
order easily became confused with the support of factions allied
politically with the party in power at Washington. As the Southern
Republicans were gradually outvoted or overpowered at home, their
appeals for help from the general government became more urgent, while
the continuance of such interference became more questionable to
thoughtful men.
Before this state of things, there was a gradual division of opinion
among Republicans at the North, and especially among their leaders.
Against the call to protect the freedmen and bridle the slave-holding
spirit in its new forms, rose the call to return to the old respect for
local rights, and let each Southern State manage its own affairs, as did
each Northern State. To this changed attitude came some of the
staunchest of the old anti-slavery leaders, and many of the younger
generation. During the early years of Grant's administration, the
question did not present itself in acute forms. The Ku-Klux law of 1870,
though it might strain the Constitution a little, received general
acquiescence because the abuse it aimed at was so flagrant. But the
ostracism of the entire official class of the old South was growingly
recognized as a grievance and a wrong. It was the spirit of proscription
that brought on the political crisis of 1872. That proscriptive spirit
broke up the Republican party in Missouri; the liberal element, led by
Carl Schurz and B. Gratz Brown, held a State convention. Their movement
fell in with a strong rising tide of opposition to Grant's
administration within the Republican party. Its grounds were
various,--chiefly, a protest against wide and gross maladministration, a
demand for a reformed and scientific civil-service, opposition to the
high tariff, and the desire for a more generous and reconciling policy
toward the South. The movement was especially prompted by a group of
leading independent journals conducted by very able men,--the New York
_Evening Post_, under William Cullen Bryant; the _Nation_, edited by E.
L. Godkin; the Cincinnati _Commercial_ of Murat Halstead; the
Louisville _Courier-Journal_ of Henry Watterson; the Springfield
_Republican_ of Samuel Bowles. Sympathetic in the main was Horace
Greeley's New York _Tribune_. In more or less close alliance were a few
of the congressional leaders, notably Sumner, who had quarreled bitterly
with Grant over the proposed annexation of San Domingo; Trumbull, who
was never in close touch with his old party after the impeachment trial;
and Carl Schurz, who was now in the Senate.
A national convention was held at Cincinnati, in May, 1872. The
Democrats had so little hope of separate success that they stood ready
to fall in with the new departure, and this gave greater importance to
its action. For its Presidential candidate, the foremost name had been
that of the elder Charles Francis Adams. Of the most distinguished
family in the country's political annals; one of the founders of the
Free Soil party; a conservative but resolute Republican; minister to
England through the war, and most serviceable there by his firmness and
wisdom; eminent by character, experience, and mental equipment; so
indifferent to office that he almost openly scorned the proffered
honor,--he seemed to the reformers a nearly ideal candidate, however
much his reserved and distant manners might handicap him before a
popular constituency.
But the spite of a disappointed aspirant, B. Gratz Brown, and the
caprice of the convention, turned its choice by a sudden impulse to
Horace Greeley. It was a choice that from the first moment not only
defeated but almost stultified the liberal movement. It mattered not
much what principles the convention set forth. Tariff reform it had
already set aside, and Greeley was a zealous protectionist. For
scientific civil-service reform he cared nothing, and to mistakes in his
personal choices he was at least as liable as Grant. His revolt against
Grant was due partly to a dispute about State patronage. Only in
generous sentiment toward the South did he fitly represent the original
and best element of the convention. He was dropped at once by the
_Evening Post_, the _Nation_, and a large part of the liberals. The
Democrats, despairing of any other way to success, indorsed his
nomination. But the acceptance of a candidate who for thirty years had
been showering hard words on the Democracy was almost grotesque. The
South was halfhearted in his support. A few of the faithful nominated
Charles O'Conor on an independent Democrat ticket. The question was only
of the size of the majority against Greeley.
His wisest supporters avowed as the best significance of his candidacy:
"It means that the war is really over." Greeley had proved the sincerity
of his friendliness toward the South at a heavy cost. President Johnson
held Jefferson Davis in long imprisonment, with the aggravation not only
of close confinement and even a temporary manacling, but of a public
accusation of complicity in the murder of Lincoln. It was treatment
wholly unfit for a prisoner of state and a man of Davis's character. Its
effect on the South may be judged by imagining how the North would have
felt had Lincoln fallen into Southern hands and been kept in shackles
and under the charge of assassination. The imprisonment of Davis and the
avowed purpose to try him as a traitor were utterly out of keeping with
the general recognition that secession and its sequel were to be dealt
with as a political wrong and not a personal crime.
Greeley, who on the very morning after Lee's surrender had called for a
universal amnesty, showed his faith by his works when at the opportunity
in May, 1867, he offered himself, in company with Gerrit Smith, as
bondsmen for Davis, thus obtaining his release, and incurring for
himself a storm of obloquy. The storm was short-lived, but revived in
greater fury when Greeley became a Presidential candidate against Grant,
with the support of the Democracy and the South. The campaign was full
of bitterness and abuse. In _Harper's Weekly_, of which the editorial
page was conducted by the high-spirited and gentle George William
Curtis, Nast assailed the liberals in savage cartoons; in one Sumner was
depicted as scattering flowers on the grave of Preston Brooks, and
another showed Greeley shaking hands with the shade of Wilkes Booth over
the grave of Lincoln. From the other side Grant was attacked with equal
ferocity.
Greeley went down in overwhelming defeat, and died of exhaustion and a
broken heart before the electoral votes were counted. But something had
been gained. There had been a breaking of old lines. And one of the
South's main grievances had been almost removed. Within a month after
the Cincinnati convention, its call for amnesty was vindicated by a bill
passed in Congress removing the disabilities of almost all the excluded
class. Out of some 160,000, only about 700 were left on the proscribed
list.