"THE BLACK TERROR"
The surrender of Lee and his army was not actually the end of the war.
The army of General Johnstone and some smaller Confederate forces were
still in being; but their suppression seemed clearly only a matter of
time, and all men's eyes were already turned to the problem of
reconstruction, and on no man did the urgency of that problem press more
ominously than on the President.
Slavery was dead. This was already admitted in the South as well as in
the North. Had the Confederacy, by some miracle, achieved its
independence during the last year of the war, it is extremely unlikely
that Slavery would have endured within its borders. This was the
publicly expressed opinion of Jefferson Davis even before the adoption
of Lee's policy of recruiting slaves and liberating them on enlistment
had completed the work which the Emancipation Proclamation of Lincoln
had begun. Before the war was over, Missouri, where the Slavery problem
was a comparatively small affair, and Maryland, which had always had a
good record for humanity and justice in the treatment of its slave
population, had declared themselves Free States. The new Governments
organized under Lincoln's superintendence in the conquered parts of the
Confederacy had followed suit. It was a comparatively easy matter to
carry the celebrated Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution declaring
Slavery illegal throughout the Union.
But, as no one knew better than the President, the abolition of Slavery
was a very different thing from the solution of the Negro problem. Six
years before his election he had used of the problem of Slavery in the
South these remarkable words: "I surely will not blame them (the
Southerners) for not doing what I should not know how to do myself. If
all earthly power was given I should not know what to do as to the
existing institution." The words now came back upon him with an awful
weight which he fully appreciated. All earthly power was given--direct
personal power to a degree perhaps unparalleled in history--and he had
to find out what to do.
His own belief appears always to have been that the only permanent
solution of the problem was Jefferson's. He did not believe that black
and white races would permanently live side by side on a footing of
equality, and he loathed with all the loathing of a Kentuckian the
thought of racial amalgamation. In his proposal to the Border States he
had suggested repatriation in Africa, and he now began to develop a
similar project on a larger scale.
But the urgent problem of the reconstruction of the Union could not wait
for the completion of so immense a task. The seceding States must be got
into their proper relation with the Federal Government as quickly as
possible, and Lincoln had clear ideas as to how this should be done. The
reconstructed Government of Louisiana which he organized was a working
model of what he proposed to do throughout the South. All citizens of
the State who were prepared to take the oath of allegiance to the
Federal Government were to be invited to elect a convention and frame a
constitution. They were required to annul the ordinances of Secession,
to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, and to repudiate the Confederate
Debt. The Executive would then recognize the State as already restored
to its proper place within the Union, with the full rights of internal
self-government which the Constitution guaranteed. The freedmen were of
course not citizens, and could, as such, take no part in these
proceedings; but Lincoln recommended, without attempting to dictate,
that the franchise should be extended to "the very intelligent and those
who have fought for us during the war."
Such was Lincoln's policy of reconstruction. He was anxious to get as
much as possible of that policy in working order before Congress should
meet. His foresight was justified, for as soon as Congress met the
policy was challenged by the Radical wing of the Republican Party,
whose spokesman was Senator Sumner of Massachusetts.
Charles Sumner has already been mentioned in these pages. The time has
come when something like a portrait of him must be attempted. He was of
a type which exists in all countries, but for which America has found
the exact and irreplaceable name. He was a "high-brow." The phrase
hardly needs explanation; it corresponds somewhat to what the French
mean by _intellectuel_, but with an additional touch of moral
priggishness which exactly suits Sumner. It does not, of course, imply
that a man can think. Sumner was conspicuous even among politicians for
his ineptitude in this respect. But it implies a pose of superiority
both as regards culture and as regards what a man of that kind calls
"idealism" which makes such an one peculiarly offensive to his
fellow-men. "The Senator so conducts himself," said Fessenden, a
Republican, and to a great extent an ally, "that he has no friends." He
had a peculiar command of the language of insult and vituperation that
was all the more infuriating because obviously the product not of sudden
temper, but of careful and scholarly preparation. In all matters
requiring practical action he was handicapped by an incapacity for
understanding men; in matters requiring mental lucidity by an incapacity
for following a line of consecutive thought.
The thesis of which Sumner appeared as the champion was about as silly
as ever a thesis could be. It was that the United States were bound by
the doctrine set out in the Declaration of Independence to extend the
Franchise indiscriminately to the Negroes.
Had Sumner had any sense it might have occurred to him that the author
of the Declaration of Independence might be presumed to have some
knowledge of its meaning and content. Did Thomas Jefferson think that
his doctrines involved Negro Suffrage? So far from desiring that Negroes
should vote with white men, he did not believe that they could even live
in the same free community. Yet since Sumner's absurd fallacy has a
certain historical importance through the influence it exerted on
Northern opinion, it may be well to point out where it lay.
The Declaration of Independence lays down three general principles
fundamental to Democracy. One is that all men are equal in respect of
their natural rights. The second is that the safeguarding of men's
natural rights is the object of government. The third that the basis of
government is contractual--its "just powers" being derived from the
consent of the governed to an implied contract.
The application of the first of these principles to the Negro is plain
enough. Whatever else he was, the Negro was a man, and, as such, had an
equal title with other men to life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness. But neither Jefferson nor any other sane thinker ever
included the electoral suffrage among the _natural_ rights of men.
Voting is part of the machinery of government in particular States. It
is, in such communities, an acquired right depending according to the
philosophy of the Declaration of Independence on an implied contract.
Now if such a contract did really underlie American, as all human
society, nothing can be more certain than that the Negro had neither
part nor lot in it. When Douglas pretended that the black race was not
included in the expression "all men" he was talking sophistry, but when
he said that the American Republic had been made "by white men for white
men" he was stating, as Lincoln readily acknowledged, an indisputable
historical fact. The Negro was a man and had the natural rights of a
man; but he could have no claim to the special privileges of an American
citizen because he was not and never had been an American citizen. He
had not come to America as a citizen; no one would ever have dreamed of
bringing him or even admitting him if it had been supposed that he was
to be a citizen. He was brought and admitted as a slave. The fact that
the servile relationship was condemned by the democratic creed could not
make the actual relationship of the two races something wholly other
than what it plainly was. A parallel might be found in the case of a man
who, having entered into an intrigue with a woman, wholly animal and
mercenary in its character, comes under the influence of a philosophy
which condemns such a connection as sinful. He is bound to put an end to
the connection. He is bound to act justly and humanely towards the
woman. But no sane moralist would maintain that he was bound to marry
the woman--that is, to treat the illicit relationship as if it were a
wholly different lawful relationship such as it was never intended to be
and never could have been.
Such was the plain sense and logic of the situation. To drive such sense
into Sumner's lofty but wooden head would have been an impossible
enterprise, but the mass of Northerners could almost certainly have been
persuaded to a rational policy if a sudden and tragic catastrophe had
not altered at a critical moment the whole complexion of public affairs.
Lincoln made his last public speech on April 11, 1865, mainly in defence
of his Reconstruction policy as exemplified in the test case of
Louisiana. On the following Good Friday he summoned his last Cabinet, at
which his ideas on the subject were still further developed. That
Cabinet meeting has an additional interest as presenting us with one of
the best authenticated of those curious happenings which we may
attribute to coincidence or to something deeper, according to our
predilections. It is authenticated by the amplest testimony that Lincoln
told his Cabinet that he expected that that day would bring some
important piece of public news--he thought it might be the surrender of
Johnstone and the last of the Confederate armies--and that he gave as a
reason the fact that he had had a certain dream, which had come to him
on the night before Gettysburg and on the eve of almost every other
decisive event in the history of the war. Certain it is that Johnstone
did not surrender that day, but before midnight an event of far graver
and more fatal purport had changed the destiny of the nation. Abraham
Lincoln was dead.
A conspiracy against his life and that of the Northern leaders had been
formed by a group of exasperated and fanatical Southerners who met at
the house of a Mrs. Suratt in the neighbourhood of Washington. One of
the conspirators was to kill Seward, who was confined to his bed by
illness, but on whom an unsuccessful attempt was made. Another, it is
believed, was instructed to remove Grant, but the general unexpectedly
left Washington, and no direct threat was offered to him. The task of
making away with the President was assigned to John Wilkes Booth, a
dissolute and crack-brained actor. Lincoln and his wife were present
that night at a _gala_ performance of a popular English comedy called
"Our American Cousin." Booth obtained access to the Presidential box and
shot his victim behind the ear, causing instant loss of consciousness,
which was followed within a few hours by death. The assassin leapt from
the box on to the stage shouting: "_Sic semper Tyrannis!_" and, though
he broke his leg in the process, succeeded, presumably by the aid of a
confederate among the theatre officials, in getting away. He was later
hunted down, took refuge in a bar, which was set on fire, and was shot
in attempting to escape.
The murder of Lincoln was the work of a handful of crazy fools. Already
the South, in spite of its natural prejudices, was beginning to
understand that he was its best friend. Yet on the South the retribution
was to fall. It is curious to recall the words which Lincoln himself had
used in repudiating on behalf of the Republican Party the folly of old
John Brown, words which are curiously apposite to his own fate and its
consequences.
"That affair, in its philosophy," he had said, "corresponds to the many
attempts related in history at the assassination of kings and emperors.
An enthusiast broods over the oppression of a people till he fancies
himself commissioned by Heaven to liberate them. He ventures the
attempt, which ends in little else than his own execution. Orsini's
attempt on Louis Napoleon and John Brown's attempt at Harper's Ferry
were, in their philosophy, precisely the same. The eagerness to cast
blame on Old England in the one case and on New England in the other
does not disprove the sameness of the two things." It may be added that
the "philosophy" of Booth was also "precisely the same" as that of
Orsini and Brown, and that the "eagerness to cast blame" on the
conquered South was equally unjustifiable and equally inevitable.
The anger of the North was terrible, and was intensified by the
recollection of the late President's pleas for lenity and a
forgetfulness of the past. "This is their reply to magnanimity!" was the
almost universal cry. The wild idea that the responsible heads of the
Confederacy were privy to the deed found a wide credence which would
have been impossible in cooler blood. The justifiable but unrestrained
indignation which Booth's crime provoked must be counted as the first of
the factors which made possible the tragic blunders of the
Reconstruction.
Another factor was the personality of the new President. Andrew Johnson
occupied a position in some ways analogous to that of Tyler a generation
earlier. He had been chosen Vice-President as a concession to the War
Democrats and to the Unionists of the Border States whose support had
been thought necessary to defeat McClellan. With the Northern
Republicans who now composed the great majority of Congress he had no
political affinity whatever. Yet at the beginning of his term of office
he was more popular with the Radicals than Lincoln had ever been. He
seemed to share to the full the violence of the popular mood. His
declaration that as murder was a crime, so treason was a crime, and
"must be made odious," was welcomed with enthusiasm by the very men who
afterwards impeached him. Nor, when we blame these men for trafficking
with perjurers and digging up tainted and worthless evidence for the
purpose of sustaining against him the preposterous charge of complicity
in the murder of his predecessor, must we forget that he himself,
without any evidence at all, had under his own hand and seal brought the
same monstrous accusation against Jefferson Davis. Davis, when
apprehended, met the affront with a cutting reply. "There is one man at
least who knows this accusation to be false--the man who makes it.
Whatever else Andrew Johnson knows, he knows that I preferred Mr.
Lincoln to him."
It was true. Between Johnson and the chiefs of the Confederacy there was
a bitterness greater than could be found in the heart of any Northerner.
To him they were the seducers who had caught his beloved South in a net
of disloyalty and disaster. To them he was a traitor who had sold
himself to the Yankee oppressor. A social quarrel intensified the
political one. Johnson, who had been a tailor by trade, was the one
political representative of the "poor whites" of the South. He knew that
the great slave-owning squires despised him, and he hated them in
return. It was only when the issues cut deeper that it became apparent
that, while he would gladly have hanged Jeff Davis and all his Cabinet
on a sufficient number of sour apple trees (and perhaps he was the one
man in the United States who really wanted to do so), he was none the
less a Southerner to the backbone; it was only when the Negro question
was raised that the Northern men began to realize, what any Southerner
or man acquainted with the South could have told them, that the attitude
of the "poor white" towards the Negro was a thousand times more hostile
than that of the slave-owner.
Unfortunately, by the same token, the new President had not, as Lincoln
would have had, the ear of the North.
Had Lincoln lived he would have approached the task of persuading the
North to support his policy with many advantages which his successor
necessarily lacked. He would have had the full prestige of the undoubted
Elect of the People--so important to an American President, especially
in a conflict with Congress. He would have had the added prestige of the
ruler under whose administration the Rebellion had been crushed and the
Union successfully restored. But he would also have had an instinctive
understanding of the temper of the Northern masses and a thorough
knowledge of the gradations of opinion and temper among the Northern
politicians.
Johnson had none of these qualifications, while his faults of temper
were a serious hindrance to the success of his policy. He was perhaps
the purest lover of his country among all the survivors of Lincoln: the
fact that told so heavily against his success, that he had no party,
that he broke with one political connection in opposing Secession and
with another in opposing Congressional Reconstruction, is itself a sign
of the integrity and consistency of his patriotism. Also he was on the
right side. History, seeing how cruelly he was maligned and how
abominably he was treated, owes him these acknowledgments. But he was
not a prudent or a tactful man. Too much importance need not be attached
to the charge of intemperate drinking, which is probably true but not
particularly serious. If Johnson had got drunk every night of his life
he would only have done what some of the greatest and most successful
statesmen in history had done before him. But there was an intemperance
of character about the man which was more disastrous in its consequences
than a few superfluous whiskies could have been. He was easily drawn
into acrimonious personal disputes, and when under their influence would
push a quarrel to all lengths with men with whom it was most important
in the public interest that he should work harmoniously.
For the extremists, of whom Sumner was a type, were still a minority
even among the Republican politicians; nor was Northern opinion, even
after the murder of Lincoln, yet prepared to support their policy. There
did, however, exist in the minds of quite fair-minded Northerners, in
and out of Congress, certain not entirely unreasonable doubts, which it
should have been the President's task--as it would certainly have been
Lincoln's--to remove by reason and persuasion. He seems to have failed
to see that he had to do this; and certainly he altogether failed to do
it.
The fears of such men were twofold. They feared that the "rebel" States,
if restored immediately to freedom of action and to the full enjoyment
of their old privileges, would use these advantages for the purpose of
preparing a new secession at some more favourable opportunity. And they
feared that the emancipated Negro would not be safe under a Government
which his old masters controlled.
It may safely be said that both fears were groundless, though they were
both fears which a reasonable man quite intelligibly entertains.
Naturally, the South was sore; no community likes having to admit
defeat. Also, no doubt, the majority of Southerners would have refused
to admit that they were in the wrong in the contest which was now
closed; indeed, it was by pressing this peculiarly tactless question
that Sumner and his friends procured most of their evidence of the
persistence of "disloyalty" in the South. On the other hand, two facts
already enforced in these pages have to be remembered. The first is that
the Confederacy was not in the full sense a nation. Its defenders felt
their defeat as men feel the downfall of a political cause to which they
are attached, not quite as men feel the conquest of their country by
foreigners. The second is that from the first there had been many who,
while admitting the _right_ of secession--and therefore, by
implication, the justice of the Southern cause--had yet doubted its
expediency. It is surely not unnatural to suppose that the disastrous
issue of the experiment had brought a great many round to this point of
view. No doubt there was still a residue--perhaps a large residue--of
quite impenitent "rebels" who were prepared to renew the battle if they
saw a good chance, but the conditions under which the new Southern
Governments had come into existence offered sufficient security against
such men controlling them. Irreconcilables of that type would not have
taken the oath of allegiance, would not have repealed the Ordinances of
Secession or repudiated the Confederate Debt, and, if they had no great
objection to abolishing Slavery, would probably have made it a point of
honour not to do it at Northern dictation. What those who were now
asking for re-admission to their ancient rights in the Union had already
done or were prepared to do was sufficient evidence that moderation and
an accessible temper were predominant in their counsels.
The other fear was even more groundless. There might in the South be a
certain bitterness against the Northerner; there was none at all against
the Negro. Why should there be? During the late troubles the Negro had
deserved very well of the South. At a time when practically every active
male of the white population was in the fighting line, when a slave
insurrection might have brought ruin and disaster on every Southern
home, not a slave had risen. The great majority of the race had gone on
working faithfully, though the ordinary means of coercion were almost
necessarily in abeyance. Even when the Northern armies came among them,
proclaiming their emancipation, many of them continued to perform their
ordinary duties and to protect the property and secrets of their
masters. Years afterwards the late Dr. Booker Washington could boast
that there was no known case of one of his race betraying a trust. All
this was publicly acknowledged by leading Southerners and one-time
supporters of Slavery like Alexander Stephens, who pressed the claims of
the Negro to fair and even generous treatment at the hands of the
Southern whites. It is certain that these in the main meant well of the
black race. It is equally certain that, difficult as the problem was,
they were more capable of dealing with it than were alien theorizers
from the North, who had hardly seen a Negro save, perhaps, as a waiter
at an hotel.
It is a notable fact that the soldiers who conquered the South were at
this time practically unanimous in support of a policy of reconciliation
and confidence. Sherman, to whom Johnstone surrendered a few days after
Lincoln's death, wished to offer terms for the surrender of all the
Southern forces which would have guaranteed to the seceding States the
full restoration of internal self-government. Grant sent to the
President a reassuring report as to the temper of the South which Sumner
compared to the "whitewashing message of Franklin Pierce" in regard to
Kansas.
Yet it would be absurd to deny that the cleavage between North and
South, inevitable after a prolonged Civil War, required time to heal.
One event might indeed have ended it almost at once, and that event
almost occurred. A foreign menace threatening something valued by both
sections would have done more than a dozen Acts of Congress or
Amendments to the Constitution. There were many to whom this had always
appeared the most hopeful remedy for the sectionable trouble. Among them
was Seward, who, having been Lincoln's Secretary of State, now held the
same post under Johnson. While secession was still little more than a
threat he had proposed to Lincoln the deliberate fomentation of a
dispute with some foreign power--he did not appear to mind which. It is
thought by some that, after the war, he took up and pressed the
_Alabama_ claims with the same notion. That quarrel, however, would
hardly have met the case. The ex-Confederates could not be expected to
throw themselves with enthusiasm into a war with England to punish her
for providing them with a navy. It was otherwise with the trouble which
had been brewing in Mexico.
Napoleon III. had taken advantage of the Civil War to violate in a very
specific fashion the essential principle of the Monroe Doctrine. He had
interfered in one of the innumerable Mexican revolutions and taken
advantage of it to place on the throne an emperor of his own choice,
Maximilian, a cadet of the Hapsburg family, and to support his nominee
by French bayonets. Here was a challenge which the South was even more
interested in taking up than the North, and, if it had been persisted
in, it is quite thinkable that an army under the joint leadership of
Grant and Lee and made up of those who had learnt to respect each other
on a hundred fields from Bull Run to Spottsylvania might have erased all
bitter memories by a common campaign on behalf of the liberties of the
continent. But Louis Napoleon was no fool; and in this matter he acted
perhaps with more regard to prudence than to honour. He withdrew the
French troops, leaving Maximilian to his fate, which he promptly met at
the hands of his own subjects.
The sectional quarrel remained unappeased, and the quarrel between the
President and Congress began. Congress was not yet Radical, but it was
already decidedly, though still respectfully, opposed to Johnson's
policy. While only a few of its members had yet made up their minds as
to what ought to be done about Reconstruction, the great majority had a
strong professional bias which made them feel that the doing or not
doing of it should be in their hands and not in those of the Executive.
It was by taking advantage of this prevailing sentiment that the
Radicals, though still a minority, contrived to get the leadership more
and more into their own hands.
Of the Radicals Sumner was the spokesman most conspicuous in the public
eye. But not from him came either the driving force or the direction
which ultimately gave them the control of national policy.
Left to himself, Sumner could never have imposed the iron oppression
from which it took the South a life-and-death wrestle of ten years to
shake itself free. At the worst he would have been capable of imposing a
few paper pedantries, such as his foolish Civil Rights Bill, which would
have been torn up before their ink was dry. The will and intelligence
which dictated the Reconstruction belonged to a very different man, a
man entitled to a place not with puzzle-headed pedants or coat-turning
professionals but with the great tyrants of history.
Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania was in almost every respect the
opposite of his ally, Charles Sumner of Massachusetts. Sumner, empty of
most things, was especially empty of humour. Stevens had abundance of
humour of a somewhat fierce but very real kind. Some of his caustic
strokes are as good as anything recorded of Talleyrand: notably his
reply to an apologist of Johnson who urged in the President's defence
that he was "a selfmade man." "I am delighted to hear it," said Stevens
grimly; "it relieves the Creator of a terrible responsibility." With
this rather savage wit went courage which could face the most enormous
of tests; like Rabelais, like Danton, he could jest with death when
death was touching him on the shoulder. In public life he was not so
much careless of what he considered conventions as defiantly happy in
challenging them. It gave him keen delight to outrage at once the racial
sentiments of the South and the Puritanism of the North by compelling
the politicians whom he dominated and despised to pay public court to
his mulatto mistress.
The inspiring motive of this man was hatred of the South. It seems
probable that this sentiment had its origin in a genuine and honourable
detestation of Slavery.
As a practising lawyer in Pennsylvania he had at an earlier period taken
a prominent part in defending fugitive slaves. But by the time that he
stood forward as the chief opponent of the Presidential policy of
conciliation, Slavery had ceased to exist; yet his passion against the
former slave-owners seemed rather to increase than to diminish. I think
it certain, though I cannot produce here all the evidence that appears
to me to support such a conclusion, that it was the negative rather than
the positive aspect of his policy that attracted him most. Sumner might
dream of the wondrous future in store for the Negro race--of whose
qualities and needs he knew literally nothing--under Bostonian tutelage.
But I am sure that for Stevens the vision dearest to his heart was
rather that of the proud Southern aristocracy compelled to plead for
mercy on its knees at the tribunal of its hereditary bondsmen.
Stevens was a great party leader. Not such a leader as Jefferson or
Jackson had been: a man who sums up and expresses the will of masses of
men. Nor yet such a leader as later times have accustomed us to; a man
who by bribery or intrigue induces his fellow-professionals to support
him. He was one of those who rule by personal dominance. His courage has
already been remarked; and he knew how much fearlessness can achieve in
a profession where most men are peculiarly cowardly. It was he who
forced the issue between the President and Congress and obtained at a
stroke a sort of captaincy in the struggle by moving in the House of
Representatives that the consideration of Reconstruction by Congress
would precede any consideration of the President's message asking for
the admission of the representatives of the reorganized States.
By a combination of forceful bullying and skilful strategy Stevens
compelled the House of Representatives to accept his leadership in this
matter, but the action of Congress on other questions during these early
months of the contest shows how far it still was from accepting his
policy. The plan of Reconstruction which the majority now favoured is to
be found outlined in the Fourteenth Constitutional Amendment which, at
about this time, it recommended for adoption by the States.
The provisions of this amendment were threefold. One, for which a
precedent had been afforded by the President's own action, declared that
the public debt incurred by the Federal Government should never be
repudiated, and also that no State should pay or accept responsibility
for any debt incurred for the purpose of waging war against the
Federation. Another, probably unwise from the point of view of
far-sighted statesmanship but more or less in line with the President's
policy, provided for the exclusion from office of all who, having sworn
allegiance to the Constitution of the United States, had given aid to a
rebellion against its Government. The third, which was really the
crucial one, provided a settlement of the franchise question which
cannot be regarded as extreme or unreasonable. It will be remembered
that the original Constitutional Compromise had provided for the
inclusion, in calculating the representation of a State, of all "free
persons" and of three-fifths of the "other persons"--that is, of the
slaves. By freeing the slaves the representation to which the South was
entitled was automatically increased by the odd two-fifths of their
number, and this seemed to Northerners unreasonable, unless the freedmen
were at the same time enfranchised. Congress decided to recommend that
the representation of the South should be greater or less according to
the extent to which the Negro population were admitted to the franchise
or excluded from it. This clause was re-cast more than once in order to
satisfy a fantastic scruple of Sumner's concerning the indecency of
mentioning the fact that some people were black and others white, a
scruple which he continued to enforce with his customary appeals to the
Declaration of Independence, until even his ally Stevens lost all
patience with him. But in itself it was not, perhaps, a bad solution of
the difficulty. Had it been allowed to stand and work without further
interference it is quite likely that many Southern States would have
been induced by the prospect of larger representation to admit in course
of time such Negroes as seemed capable of understanding the meaning of
citizenship in the European sense. Such, at any rate, was the opinion of
General Lee, as expressed in his evidence before the Reconstruction
Committee.
The South was hostile to the proposed settlement mainly on account of
the second provision. It resented the proposed exclusion of its leaders.
The sentiment was an honourable and chivalrous one, and was well
expressed by Georgia in her protest against the detention of Jefferson
Davis: "If he is guilty so are we." But the rejection of the Amendment
by the Southern States had a bad effect in the North. It may be
convenient here to remark that Davis was never tried. He was brought up
and admitted to bail (which the incalculable Greeley found for him), and
the case against him was not further pressed. In comparison with almost
every other Government that has crushed an insurrection, the Government
of the United States deserves high credit for its magnanimity in dealing
with the leaders of the Secession. Yet the course actually pursued, more
in ignorance than in malice so far as the majority were concerned,
probably caused more suffering and bitterness among the vanquished than
a hundred executions.
For the Radicals were more and more gaining control of Congress, now
openly at war with the Executive. The President had been using his veto
freely, and, as many even of his own supporters thought, imprudently.
The Republicans were eager to obtain the two-thirds majority in both
Houses necessary to carry measures over his veto, and to get it even the
meticulous Sumner was ready to stoop to some pretty discreditable
manoeuvres. The President had taken the field against Congress and
made some rather violent stump speeches, which were generally thought
unworthy of the dignity of the Chief Magistracy. Meanwhile alleged
"Southern outrages" against Negroes were vigorously exploited by the
Radicals, whose propaganda was helped by a racial riot in New Orleans,
the responsibility for which it is not easy to determine, but the
victims of which were mostly persons of colour. The net result was that
the new Congress, elected in 1866, not only gave the necessary
two-thirds majority, but was more Radical in its complexion and more
strictly controlled by the Republican machine than the old had been.
The effect was soon apparent. A Reconstruction Bill was passed by the
House and sent up to the Senate. It provided for the military government
of the conquered States until they should be reorganized, but was silent
in regard to the conditions of their re-admission. The Republican caucus
met to consider amendments, and Sumner moved that in the new
Constitutions there should be no exclusion from voting on account of
colour. This was carried against the strong protest of John Sherman, the
brother of the general and a distinguished Republican Senator. But when
the Senate met, even he submitted to the decision of the caucus, and the
Amendment Bill was carried by the normal Republican majority. Johnson
vetoed it, and it was carried by both Houses over his veto. The Radicals
had now achieved their main object. Congress was committed to
indiscriminate Negro Suffrage, and the President against it; the
controversy was narrowed down to that issue. From that moment they had
the game in their hands.
The impeachment of Johnson may be regarded as an interlude. The main
mover in the matter was Stevens. The main instrument Ben Butler--a man
disgraced alike in war and peace, the vilest figure in the politics of
that time. It was he who, when in command at New Orleans (after braver
men had captured it), issued the infamous order which virtually
threatened Southern women who showed disrespect for the Federal uniform
with rape--an order which, to the honour of the Northern soldiers, was
never carried out. He was recalled from his command, but his great
political "influence" saved him from the public disgrace which should
have been his portion. Perhaps no man, however high his character, can
mix long in the business of politics and keep his hands quite clean. The
leniency with which Butler was treated on this occasion must always
remain an almost solitary stain upon the memory of Abraham Lincoln. On
the memory of Benjamin Butler stains hardly show. At a later stage of
the war Butler showed such abject cowardice that Grant begged that if
his political importance required that he should have some military
command he should be placed somewhere where there was no fighting. This
time Butler saved himself by blackmailing his commanding officer. At the
conclusion of peace the man went back to politics, a trade for which his
temperament was better fitted; and it was he who was chosen as the chief
impugner of the conduct and honour of Andrew Johnson!
The immediate cause of the Impeachment was the dismissal of Stanton,
which Congress considered, wrongly as it would appear, a violation of an
Act which, after the quarrel became an open one, they had framed for the
express purpose of limiting his prerogative in this direction. In his
quarrel with Stanton the President seems to have had a good case, but he
was probably unwise to pursue it, and certainly unwise to allow it to
involve him in a public quarrel with Grant, the one man whose prestige
in the North might have saved the President's policy. The quarrel threw
Grant, who was already ambitious of the Presidency, into the hands of
the Republicans, and from that moment he ceased to count as a factor
making for peace and conciliation.
Johnson was acquitted, two or three honest Republican Senators declaring
in his favour, and so depriving the prosecution of the two-thirds
majority. Each Senator gave a separate opinion in writing. These
documents are of great historical interest; Sumner's especially--which
is of inordinate length and intensely characteristic--should be studied
by anyone who thinks that in these pages I have given an unfair idea of
his character.
In the meantime far more important work was being done in the
establishment of Negro rule in the South. State after State was
"reconstructed" under the terms of the Act which had been passed over
the President's veto. In every case as many white men as possible were
disfranchised on one pretext or another as "disloyal." In every case the
whole Negro population was enfranchised. Throughout practically the
whole area of what had been the Confederate States the position of the
races was reversed.
So far, in discussing the Slavery Question and all the issues which
arose out of it, I have left one factor out of account--the attitude of
the slaves themselves. I have done so deliberately because up to the
point which we have now reached that attitude had no effect on history.
The slaves had no share in the Abolition movement or in the formation of
the Republican Party. Even from John Brown's Raid they held aloof. The
President's proclamation which freed them, the Acts of Congress which
now gave them supreme power throughout the South, were not of their
making or inspiration. In politics the negro was still an unknown
factor.
There can be little doubt that under Slavery the relations of the two
races were for the most part kindly and free from rancour, that the
master was generally humane and the slave faithful. Had it not been so,
indeed, the effect of the transfer of power to the freedmen must have
been much more horrible than it actually was. On the other hand, it is
certain that when some Southern apologists said that the slaves did not
want their freedom they were wrong. Dr. Booker Washington, himself a
slave till his sixth or seventh year, has given us a picture of the
vague but very real longing which was at the back of their minds which
bears the stamp of truth. It is confirmed by their strange and
picturesque hymnology, in which the passionate desire to be "free,"
though generally apparently invoked in connection with a future life, is
none the less indicative of their temper, and in their preoccupation
with those parts of the Old Testament--the history of the Exodus, for
instance--which appeared applicable to their own condition. Yet it is
clear that they had but the vaguest idea of what "freedom" implied. Of
what "citizenship" implied they had, of course, no idea at all.
It is very far from my purpose to write contemptuously of the Negroes.
There is something very beautiful about a love of freedom wholly
independent of experience and deriving solely from the just instinct of
the human soul as to what is its due. And if, as some Southerners said,
the Negro understood by freedom mainly that he need not work, there was
a truth behind his idea, for the right to be idle if and when you choose
without reason given or permission sought is really what makes the
essential difference between freedom and slavery. But it is quite
another thing when we come to a complex national and historical product
like American citizenship. Of all that great European past, without the
memory of which the word "Republic" has no meaning, the Negro knew
nothing: with it he had no link. A barbaric version of the more barbaric
parts of the Bible supplied him with his only record of human society.
Yet Negro Suffrage, though a monstrous anomaly, might have done
comparatively little practical mischief if the Negro and his white
neighbour had been left alone to find their respective levels. The Negro
might have found a certain picturesque novelty in the amusement of
voting; the white American might have continued to control the practical
operation of Government. But it was no part of the policy of those now
in power at Washington to leave either black or white alone. "Loyal"
Governments were to be formed in the South; and to this end political
adventurers from the North--"carpet-baggers," as they were called--went
down into the conquered South to organize the Negro vote. A certain
number of disreputable Southerners, known as "scallywags," eagerly took
a hand in the game for the sake of the spoils. So of course did the
smarter and more ambitious of the freedmen. And under the control of
this ill-omened trinity of Carpet-Bagger, Scallywag, and Negro
adventurer grew up a series of Governments the like of which the sun has
hardly looked upon before or since.
The Negro is hardly to be blamed for his share in the ghastly business.
The whole machinery of politics was new to him, new and delightful as a
toy, new and even more delightful as a means of personal enrichment.
That it had or was intended to have any other purpose probably hardly
crossed his mind. His point of view--a very natural one, after all--was
well expressed by the aged freedman who was found chuckling over a pile
of dollar bills, the reward of some corrupt vote, and, when questioned,
observed: "Wal, it's de fifth time I's been bo't and sold, but, 'fo de
Lord, it's de fust I eber got de money!" Under administrations conducted
in this spirit the whole South was given up to plunder. The looting went
on persistently and on a scale almost unthinkable. The public debts
reached amazing figures, while Negro legislators voted each other wads
of public money as a kind of parlour game, amid peals of hearty African
laughter.
Meanwhile the Governments presided over by Negroes, or white courtiers
of the Negro and defended by the bayonets of an armed black militia,
gave no protection to the persons or property of the whites.
Daily insults were offered to what was now the subject race. The streets
of the proud city of Charleston, where ten years before on that fatal
November morning the Palmetto flag had been raised as the signal of
Secession, were paraded by mobs of dusky freedmen singing: "De bottom
rail's on top now, and we's g'wine to keep it dar!" It says much for the
essential kindliness of the African race that in the lawless condition
of affairs there were no massacres and deliberate cruelties were rare.
On the other hand, the animal nature of the Negro was strong, and
outrages on white women became appallingly frequent and were perpetrated
with complete impunity. Every white family had to live in something like
a constant state of siege.
It was not to be expected that ordinary men of European origin would
long bear such government. And those on whom it was imposed were no
ordinary men. They were men whose manhood had been tried by four awful
years of the supreme test, men such as had charged with Pickett up the
bloody ridge at Gettysburg, and disputed with the soldiers of Grant
every inch of tangled quagmire in the Wilderness. They found a remedy.
Suddenly, as at a word, there appeared in every part of the downtrodden
country bands of mysterious horsemen. They rode by night, wearing long
white garments with hoods that hid their faces, and to the
terror-stricken Negroes who encountered them they declared
themselves--not without symbolic truth--the ghosts of the great armies
that had died in defence of the Confederacy. But superstitious terrors
were not the only ones that they employed.
The mighty secret society called the Ku-Klux-Klan was justified by the
only thing that can justify secret societies--gross tyranny and the
denial of plain human rights. The method they employed was the method so
often employed by oppressed peoples and rarely without success--the
method by which the Irish peasantry recovered their land. It was to put
fear into the heart of the oppressor. Prominent men, both black and
white, who were identified with the evils which afflicted the State,
were warned generally by a message signed "K.K.K." to make themselves
scarce. If they neglected the warning they generally met a sudden and
bloody end. At the same time the Klan unofficially tried and executed
those criminals whom the official Government refused to suppress. These
executions had under the circumstances a clear moral justification.
Unfortunately it had the effect of familiarizing the people with the
irregular execution of Negroes, and so paved the way for those
"lynchings" for which, since the proper authorities are obviously able
and willing to deal adequately with such crimes, no such defence can be
set up.
Both sides appealed to Grant, who had been elected President on the
expiration of Johnson's term in 1868.
Had he been still the Grant of Appomattox and of the healing message to
which reference has already been made, no man would have been better
fitted to mediate between the sections and to cover with his protection
those who had surrendered to his sword. But Grant was now a mere tool in
the hands of the Republican politicians, and those politicians were
determined that the atrocious system should be maintained. They had not
even the excuse of fanaticism. Stevens was dead; he had lived just long
enough to see his policy established, not long enough to see it
imperilled. Sumner still lived, but he had quarrelled with Grant and
lost much of his influence. The men who surrounded the President cared
little enough for the Negro. Their resolution to support African rule in
the South depended merely upon the calculation that so long as it
endured the reign of the Republican party and consequently their own
professional interests were safe. A special Act of Congress was passed
to put down the Ku-Klux-Klan, and the victorious army of the Union was
again sent South to carry it into execution. But this time it found an
enemy more invulnerable than Lee had been--invulnerable because
invisible. The whole white population was in the conspiracy and kept its
secrets. The army met with no overt resistance with which it could deal,
but the silent terrorism went on. The trade of "Carpet-bagger" became
too dangerous. The ambitious Negro was made to feel that the price to be
paid for his privileges was a high one. Silently State after State was
wrested from Negro rule.
Later the Ku-Klux-Klan--for such is ever the peril of Secret Societies
and the great argument against them when not demanded by imperative
necessity--began to abuse its power. Reputable people dropped out of it,
and traitors were found in its ranks. About 1872 it disappeared. But its
work was done. In the great majority of the Southern States the voting
power of the Negro was practically eliminated. Negroid Governments
survived in three only--South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana. For
these the end came four years later.
The professional politicians of the North, whose motive for supporting
the indefensible _régime_ established by the Reconstruction Act has
already been noted, used, of course, the "atrocities" of the
Ku-Klux-Klan as electioneering material in the North. "Waving the bloody
shirt," it was called. But the North was getting tired of it, and was
beginning to see that the condition of things in the conquered States
was a national disgrace. A Democratic House of Representatives had been
chosen, and it looked as if the Democrats would carry the next
Presidential election. In fact they did carry it. But fraudulent returns
were sent in by the three remaining Negro Governments, and these gave
the Republicans a majority of one in the Electoral College. A Commission
of Enquiry was demanded and appointed, but it was packed by the
Republicans and showed itself as little scrupulous as the scoundrels who
administered the "reconstructed" States. Affecting a sudden zeal for
State Rights, it declared itself incompetent to inquire into the
circumstances under which the returns were made. It accepted them on the
word of the State authorities and declared Hayes, the Republican
candidate, elected.
It was a gross scandal, but it put an end to a grosser one. Some believe
that there was a bargain whereby the election of Hayes should be
acquiesced in peaceably on condition that the Negro Governments were not
further supported. It is equally possible that Hayes felt his moral
position too weak to continue a policy of oppression in the South. At
any rate, that policy was not continued. Federal support was withdrawn
from the remaining Negro Governments, and they fell without a blow. The
second rebellion of the South had succeeded where the first had failed.
Eleven years after Lee had surrendered to Grant at Appomattox, Grant's
successor in the Presidency surrendered to the ghost of Lee.
Negro rule was at an end. But the Negro remained, and the problem which
his existence presented was, and is, to-day, further from solution that
when Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. The signs of the
Black Terror are still visible everywhere in the South. They are visible
in the political solidarity of those Southern States--and only of those
States--which underwent the hideous ordeal, what American politicians
call "the solid South." All white men, whatever their opinions, must
vote together, lest by their division the Negro should again creep in
and regain his supremacy. They are visible in those strict laws of
segregation which show how much wider is the gulf between the races than
it was under Slavery--when the children of the white slave-owner, in
Lincoln's words, "romped freely with the little negroes." They are
visible above all in acts of unnatural cruelty committed from time to
time against members of the dreaded race. These things are inexplicable
to those who do not know the story of the ordeal which the South
endured, and cannot guess at the secret panic with which white men
contemplate the thought of its return.
Well might Jefferson tremble for his country. The bill which the first
slave-traders ran up is not yet paid. Their dreadful legacy remains and
may remain for generations to come a baffling and tormenting problem to
every American who has a better head than Sumner's and a better heart
than Legree's.