My travels in the interior of the South in the summer and fall of 1865
took me over the track of Sherman's march, which, in South Carolina at
least, looked for many miles like a broad black streak of ruin and
desolation--fences gone, lonesome smoke-stacks, surrounded by dark
heaps of ashes and cinders, marking the spots where human habitations
had stood, the fields along the road wildly overgrown by weeds, with
here and there a sickly-looking patch of cotton or corn cultivated by
negro squatters. In the city of Columbia, the political capital of the
State, I found a thin fringe of houses encircling a confused mass of
charred ruins of dwellings and business buildings which had been
destroyed by a sweeping conflagration.
No part of the South I then visited had, indeed, suffered as much from
the ravages of the war as South Carolina--the State which was looked
upon by the Northern soldier as the principal instigator of the whole
mischief and therefore deserving of special punishment. But even those
regions which had been touched but little or not at all by military
operations were laboring under dire distress. The Confederate money in
the hands of the Southern people, paper money signed by the
Confederate government without any security behind it, had by the
collapse of the Confederacy become entirely worthless. Only a few
individuals of more or less wealth had been fortunate enough to save,
and to keep throughout the war, small hoards of gold and silver, which
in the aggregate amounted to little. Immediately after the close of
the war the people may be said to have been substantially without a
"circulating medium" to serve in the transaction of ordinary business.
United States money came in to fill the vacuum, but it could not be
had for nothing; it could be obtained only by selling something for
it, in the shape of goods or of labor. The Southern people, having
during four years of war devoted their productive activity, aside from
the satisfaction of their current home wants, almost entirely to the
sustenance of their army and of the machinery of their government, and
having suffered great losses by the destruction of property, had, of
course, very little to sell. In fact, they were dreadfully
impoverished and needed all their laboring capacity to provide for the
wants of the next day; and as agriculture was their main resource,
upon which everything else depended, the next day was to them of
supreme importance.
_The First Crop Without Slaves_
But now the men come home from the war found their whole agricultural
labor system turned upside down. Slave labor had been their absolute
reliance. They had been accustomed to it, they had believed in it,
they had religiously regarded it as a necessity in the order of the
universe. During the war a large majority of the negroes had stayed
upon the plantations and attended to the crops in the wonted way in
those regions which were not touched by the Union armies. They had
heard of "Mas'r Lincoln's" Emancipation Proclamation in a more or less
vague way, but did not know exactly what it meant, and preferred to
remain quietly at work and wait for further developments. But when the
war was over, general emancipation became a well-understood reality.
The negro knew that he was a free man, and the Southern white man
found himself face to face with the problem of dealing with the negro
as a free laborer. To most of the Southern whites this problem was
utterly bewildering. Many of them, honest and well-meaning people,
admitted to me, with a sort of helpless stupefaction, that their
imagination was wholly incapable of grasping the fact that their
former slaves were now free. And yet they had to deal with this
perplexing fact, and practically to accommodate themselves to it, at
once and without delay, if they were to have any crops that year.
Many of them would frankly recognize this necessity and begin in good
faith to consider how they might meet it. But then they stumbled
forthwith over a set of old prejudices which in their minds had
acquired the stubborn force of convictions. They were sure the negro
would not work without physical compulsion; they were sure the negro
did not, and never would, understand the nature of a contract; and so
on. Yes, they "accepted the situation." Yes, they recognized that the
negro was henceforth to be a free man. But could not some method of
force be discovered and introduced to compel the negro to work? It
goes without saying that persons of such a way of thinking labored
under a heavy handicap in going at a difficult task with a settled
conviction that it was really "useless to try." But even if they did
try, and found that the negro might, after all, be induced to work
without physical compulsion, they were apt to be seriously troubled by
things which would not at all trouble an employer accustomed to free
labor. I once had an argument with a Georgia planter who vociferously
insisted that one of his negro laborers who had objected to a whipping
had thereby furnished the most conclusive proof of his unfitness for
freedom. And such statements were constantly reinforced by further
assertion that they, the Southern whites, understood the negro and
knew how to treat him, and that we of the North did not and never
would.
This might have been true in one sense, but not true in another. The
Southerner knew better than the Northerner how to treat the negro as a
slave, but it did not follow that he knew best how to treat the negro
as a freeman; and just there was the rub. It was perhaps too much to
expect of the Southern slaveholders, or of Southern society generally,
that a clear judgment of the new order of things should have come to
them at once. The total overturning of the whole labor system of a
country, accomplished suddenly, without preparation or general
transition, is a tremendous revolution, a terrible wrench, well apt to
confuse men's minds. It should not have surprised any fair-minded
person that many Southern people for a time clung to the accustomed
idea that the landowner must also own the black man tilling his land,
and that any assertion of freedom of action on the part of that black
man was insubordination equivalent to criminal revolt, and any dissent
by the black man from the employer's opinion or taste intolerable
insolence. Nor should it be forgotten that the urgent necessity of
negro labor for that summer's crop could hardly fail to sharpen the
nervous tension then disquieting Southern society.
_Restless Foot-loose Negroes_
It is equally natural that the negro population of the South should at
that time have been unusually restless. I have already mentioned the
fact that during the Civil War the bulk of the slave population
remained quietly at work on the plantations, except in districts
touched by the operations of the armies. Had negro slaves not done so,
the Rebellion would not have survived its first year. They presented
the remarkable spectacle of an enslaved race doing slaves' work to
sustain a government and an army fighting for the perpetuation of its
enslavement. Some colored people did, indeed, escape from the
plantations and run into the Union lines where our troops were within
reach, and some of their young men enlisted in the Union army as
soldiers. But there was nowhere any commotion among them that had in
the slightest degree the character of an uprising in force of slaves
against their masters. Nor was there, when, after the downfall of the
Confederacy, general emancipation had become an established fact, a
single instance of an act of vengeance committed by a negro upon a
white man for inhumanity suffered by him or his while in the condition
of bondage. No race or class of men ever passed from slavery to
freedom with a record equally pure of revenge. But many of them,
especially in the neighborhood of towns or of Federal encampments,
very naturally yielded to the temptation of testing and enjoying their
freedom by walking away from the plantations to have a frolic. Many
others left their work because their employers ill-treated them or in
other ways incurred their distrust. Thus it happened that in various
parts of the South the highroads and byways were alive with foot-loose
colored people.
I did not find, so far as I was informed by personal observation or
report, that their conduct could, on the whole, be called lawless.
There was some stealing of pigs and chickens and other petty
pilfering, but rather less than might have been expected. More serious
depredations rarely, if ever, occurred. The vagrants were throughout
very good-natured. They had their carousals with singing and dancing,
and their camp-meetings with their peculiar religious programs. But,
while these things might in themselves have been harmless enough under
different circumstances, they produced deplorable effects in the
situation then existing. Those negroes stayed away from the
plantations just when their labor was most needed to secure the crops
of the season, and those crops were more than ordinarily needed to
save the population from continued want and misery. Violent efforts
were made by white men to drive the straggling negroes back to the
plantations by force, and reports of bloody outrages inflicted upon
colored people came from all quarters. I had occasion to examine
personally into several of those cases, and I saw in odious hospitals
negroes, women as well as men, whose ears had been cut off, or whose
bodies were slashed with knives, or bruised with whips or bludgeons,
or punctured with shot-wounds. Dead negroes were found in considerable
numbers in the country roads or on the fields, shot to death, or
strung on the limbs of trees. In many districts the colored people
were in a panic of fright, and the whites in a state of almost insane
irritation against them. These conditions in their worst form were
only local, but they were liable to spread, for there was plenty of
inflammable spirit of the same kind all over the South. It looked
sometimes as if wholesale massacres were prevented only by the
presence of the Federal garrisons which were dispersed all over the
country.
[Illustration: MAJOR-GENERAL O. O. HOWARD
FROM A PHOTOGRAPH TAKEN IN DECEMBER, 1862, JUST AFTER HIS PROMOTION TO
MAJOR-GENERAL OF VOLUNTEERS]
_The Freedmen's Bureau_
Indeed, nothing could have been more necessary at that time than the
active interposition of the Federal power between the whites and the
blacks of the South, not only to prevent or repress violent
collisions, but to start the former masters and the former slaves on
the path of peaceful and profitable coöperation as employers and free
laborers. This was a difficult task. Northern men who had come to the
South to purchase or lease plantations enjoyed the great advantage of
having money, so that they could pay the wages of their negro laborers
in cash, which the negroes preferred. The Southern men, having been
stripped almost naked by the war, had, aside from current sustenance,
only prospective payment to offer, consisting mostly of a part of the
crop. While many planters were just and even liberal in the making of
cash contracts, others would take advantage of the ignorance of the
negroes and try to tie them down to stipulations which left to the
laborer almost nothing, or even obliged him to run in debt to his
employer, and thus drop into the condition of a mere peon, a
debt-slave. It is a very curious fact that some of the forms of
contract drawn up by former slaveholders contained provisions looking
to the probability of a future restoration of slavery. There was, not
unnaturally, much distrust of the planters among the negroes, who, in
concluding contracts, feared to compromise their rights as freemen or
to be otherwise overreached. To allay that distrust and, in many
cases, to secure their just dues, they stood much in need of an
adviser in whom they had confidence and to whom they could look for
protection, while, on the other hand, the employers of negro labor
stood in equal need of some helpful authority to give the colored
people sound instruction as to their duties as freemen and to lead
them back to the path of industry and good order when, with their
loose notions of the binding force of agreements, they broke their
contracts, or indulged themselves otherwise in unruly pranks.
To this end the "Freedmen's Bureau" was instituted, an organization of
civil officials who were, with the necessary staffs, dispersed all
over the South to see that the freedmen had their rights and to act as
intermediaries between them and the whites. The conception was a good
one, and the institution, at the head of which General O. O. Howard
was put, did useful service in many instances.
Thus the strain of the situation was somewhat relieved by the
interposition of the Federal authority between clashing elements, but
by no means as much as was required to produce a feeling of security.
The labor puzzle, aggravated by race antagonism, was indeed the main
distressing influence, but not the only one. To the younger
Southerners who had grown up in the heated atmosphere of the political
feud about slavery, to whom the threat of disunion as a means to save
slavery had been like a household word, and who had always regarded
the bond of Union as a shackle to be cast off, the thought of being
"reunited" to "the enemy," the hated Yankee, was distasteful in the
extreme. Such sentiments of the "unconquered" found excited and
exciting expression in the Southern press, and were largely
entertained by many Southern clergymen of different denominations and
still more ardently by Southern women. General Thomas Kilby Smith,
commanding the southern districts of Alabama, reported to me that when
he suggested to Bishop Wilmer, of the Episcopal diocese of Alabama,
the propriety of restoring to the Litany that prayer which includes
the President of the United States, the whole of which he had ordered
his rectors to expurge, the bishop refused, first, upon the ground
that he could not pray for a continuance of martial law, and,
secondly, because he would, by ordering the restoration of the prayer,
stultify himself in the event of Alabama and the Southern Confederacy
regaining independence.
_Pickles and Patriotism_
The influence exercised by the feelings of the women of the South upon
the condition of mind and the conduct of the men was, of course, very
great. Of those feelings I witnessed a significant manifestation in a
hotel at Savannah. At the public dinner-table I sat opposite a lady in
black, probably mourning. She was middle-aged, but still handsome, and
of an agreeable expression of countenance. She seemed to be a lady of
the higher order of society. A young lieutenant in Federal uniform
took a seat by my side, a youth of fine features and gentlemanly
appearance. The lady, as I happened to notice, darted a glance at him
which, as it impressed me, indicated that the presence of the person
in Federal uniform was highly obnoxious to her. She seemed to grow
restless, as if struggling with an excitement hard to restrain. To
judge from the tone of her orders to the waiter, she was evidently
impatient to finish her dinner. When she reached for a dish of pickles
standing on the table at a little distance from her, the lieutenant
got up and, with a polite bow, took it and offered it to her. She
withdrew her hand as if it had touched something loathsome, her eyes
flashed fire, and in a tone of wrathful scorn and indignation she
said: "So you think a Southern woman will take a dish of pickles from
a hand that is dripping with the blood of her countrymen?" Then she
abruptly left the table, while the poor lieutenant, deeply blushing,
apparently stunned by the unexpected rebuff, stammered some words of
apology, assuring the lady that he had meant no offense.
The mixing of a dish of pickles with so hot an outburst of Southern
patriotism could hardly fail to evoke a smile; but the whole scene
struck me as gravely pathetic, and as auguring ill for the speedy
revival of a common national spirit.
[Illustration: A PHOTOGRAPH OF GENERAL HOWARD, TAKEN AT GOVERNOR'S
ISLAND IN 1893 AT THE CLOSE OF THE WAR GENERAL HOWARD WAS APPOINTED
CHIEF OF THE FREEDMEN'S BUREAU]
_The South's Hopeless Poverty_
Southern women had suffered much by the Civil War, on the whole far
more than their Northern sisters. There was but little exaggeration in
the phrase which was current at the time, that the Confederacy, in
order to fill its armies, had to "draw upon the cradle and the grave."
Almost every white male capable of bearing arms enlisted or was
pressed into service. The loss of men, not in proportion to the number
on the rolls, but in proportion to the whole white population, was far
heavier in the South than in the North. There were not many families
unbereft, not many women who had not the loss of a father, or a
husband, or a brother, or a friend to deplore. In the regions in
which military operations had taken place the destruction of property
had been great, and while most of that destruction seemed necessary in
the opinion of military men, in the eyes of the sufferers it appeared
wanton, cruel, malignant, devilish. The interruption of the industries
of the country, the exclusion by the blockade of the posts of all
importations from abroad, and the necessity of providing for the
sustenance of the armies in the field, subjected all classes to
various distressing privations and self-denials. There were bread
riots in Richmond. Salt became so scarce that the earthen floors of
the smoke-houses were scraped to secure the remnants of the
brine-drippings of former periods. Flour was at all times painfully
scarce. Coffee and tea were almost unattainable. Of the various little
comforts and luxuries which by long common use had almost become
necessaries, many were no longer to be had. Mothers had to ransack old
rag-bags to find material with which to clothe their children. Ladies
accustomed to a life of abundance and fashion had not only to work
their old gowns over and to wear their bonnets of long ago, but also
to flit with their children from one plantation to another in order to
find something palatable to eat in the houses of more fortunate
friends who had in time provided for themselves. And when at last the
war was over, the blockade was raised, and the necessaries and
comforts so long and so painfully missed came within sight again, the
South was made only more sensible of her poverty. It was indeed an
appalling situation, looking in many respects almost hopeless. And for
all this the Southern woman, her heart full of the mournful memories
of the sere past and heavy with the anxieties of the present, held the
"cruel Yankee" responsible.
From time to time, traveling from State to State, I reported to
President Johnson my observations and the conclusions I drew from
them. Not only was I most careful to tell him the exact truth as I saw
it; I also elicited from our military officers and from agents of the
Freedmen's Bureau stationed in the South, as well as from prominent
Southern men, statements of their views and experiences, which formed
a mighty body of authoritative testimony, coming as it did from men of
high character and important public position, some of whom were
Republicans, some Democrats, some old anti-slavery men, some old
pro-slavery men. All these papers, too, I submitted to the President.
The historian of that time will hardly find more trustworthy material.
They all substantially agreed upon certain points of fact. They all
found that the South was at peace in so far as there was no open armed
conflict between the government troops and organized bodies of
insurgents. The South was not at peace inasmuch as the different
social forces did not peaceably coöperate, and violent collisions on a
great scale were prevented or repressed only by the presence of the
Federal authority supported by the government troops on the ground for
immediate action. The "results of the war," recognized in the South in
so far as the restoration of the Union and the Federal Government,
were submitted to by virtue of necessity, and the emancipation of the
slaves and the introduction of free labor were accepted in name; but
the Union was still hateful to a large majority of the white
population of the South, the Southern Unionists were still social
outcasts, the officers of the Union were still regarded as foreign
tyrants ruling by force. And as to the abolition of slavery,
emancipation, although "accepted" in name, was still denounced by a
large majority of the former master class as an "unconstitutional"
stretch of power, to be reversed if possible; and that class, the
ruling class among the whites, was still desiring, hoping, and
striving to reduce the free negro laborer as much as possible to the
condition of a slave. And this tendency was seriously aggravated by
the fact that the South, exhausted and impoverished, stood in the most
pressing need of productive agricultural labor, while the landowners
generally did not yet know how to manage the former slave as a free
laborer, and the emancipated negro was still unused to the rights and
duties of a freeman. In short, Southern society was still in that most
confused, perplexing, and perilous of conditions--the condition of a
defeated insurrection leaving irritated feelings behind it, and of a
great social revolution only half accomplished, leaving antagonistic
forces face to face. The necessity of the presence of a restraining
and guiding higher authority could hardly have been more obvious.
[Illustration: MAJOR-GENERAL H. W. SLOCUM