THE RESTORATION OF HOME RULE IN THE SOUTH
The eight Southern States whose votes were cast in 1868 were far
different from the States of the same names in 1860, and were, like the
three still outside the Union, largely under the control of radical
Republicans. Restoration, after a fashion, they had received, but it had
been accompanied by a revolution in society, in politics, and in
economic life. "Reconstruction" is an inappropriate name for what took
place.
Many efforts have been made to show the price paid by the South for its
attempt at independence, but these have always failed to be exact. No
scheme of accounting can uncover all the costs. It is a sufficient
suggestion as to the total that a million men, at the prime of life,
were diverted from ordinary production for about three years. Not only
did the South lose the products of their labor, but it lost many of
them, while its houses, barns, and other permanent improvements wore
out, were burned, or went to pieces from lack of care. Its slave
property was destroyed. Poverty was universal within the region of the
Confederacy when Johnson issued his amnesty proclamation and the troops
came home.
The most immediate problems before the Southern planter in the spring of
1865 were his dilapidated buildings, his spring crops, and his labor
supply. Without money or credit, he needed all the stiffness of a proud
caste to hold off bankruptcy. The daughter of a prominent Mississippi
planter told later how her father, at seventy years, did the family
washing to keep his daughters from the tub. A society whose men and
women took this view of housework (for the daughters let their father
have his way) had much to learn before it could reestablish itself. Yet
this same stubbornness carried the South through the twenty trying years
after the war.
The system of slave labor was gone, but the negroes were still the chief
reliance for labor. It appears from the scanty records that are
available that the planters expected to reopen the plantations using the
freedmen as hired laborers. In 1865 and 1866 they tried this, only to
find that the negro had got beyond control and would not work.
Supervision had become hateful to him. A vagrant life appealed to his
desire for change. At best, he was unintelligent and indolent. In a few
years it became clear that the old type of plantation had vanished, and
that the substitute was far from satisfactory.
Failing at hiring the negro for wages, the planter tried to rent to him
a part of the estate. But since the tenant was penniless the landlord
had to find much or all of the tools and stock, and too often had to see
the crops deserted while the negro went riding around the county on his
mule, full of his new independence. The census records show the decline
of the plantation as the labor system changed. In 1860 the average
American farm contained 199 acres, while those of the eleven seceding
States ranged in average from 245 in Arkansas, to 430 in Georgia, and
591 in Texas. All were far above the national average, for the economics
of the plantation system impelled the owner ever to increase his
holdings. In 1870, and again in 1880, the reports show a rapid decline.
The average for the whole country went down from 199 to 134 acres in the
twenty years, as intensive agriculture advanced, but the South declined
more rapidly than the whole, and in 1880, in all but two States, the
average farm was less than half its size before the Civil War.
The vagrant, shiftless freedman was a social problem as well as
economic. To fix his new status was the effort of the legislatures that
convened in 1865, under the control of those who had qualified as loyal
in Johnson's scheme. In several States laws were passed relating to
contracts, apprenticeship, and vagrancy, under which the negro was to be
held to regular work and the employer was given the right to punish him.
The laws represented the opinion of the white citizens that special
provisions were needed to control and regulate the negro population now
that the personal bond of the owner for the good behavior of his slaves
was canceled. To the North, still excited and nervous in 1865, the laws
appeared to embody an overt attempt to restore the essentials of
slavery. They served to embitter Congress toward Johnson's plans, and to
convince Republicans that the professed loyalty of former Confederates
was hypocritical,--that these must not be permitted to return at once to
federal office or to Congress.
It was not until the summer of 1867 that Congress substituted
governments of its own design for those which Johnson had erected by
proclamation. These, meanwhile, had proceeded to revise their
constitutions and to adopt the Thirteenth Amendment, which was
proclaimed as part of the Constitution in December, 1865. The direct
hand of Congress was shown in the strengthening of the Freedmen's Bureau
in the spring of 1866, and the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment in
the following summer.
The Freedmen's Bureau had its excuse in the poverty and ignorance of the
negroes who crowded about the invading armies. Toward the end of the war
it was authorized to administer abandoned property, and to aid the
freedmen in farming upon the same. It did wide charitable and
educational work in easing the abrupt change from slavery to freedom,
and would have been dissolved a year after the return of peace had not
Congress maintained it to offset the tendencies of Johnson's
administration. Hereafter the agents of the Bureau were thrown into
politics until 1872.
The permanent government of the conquered South by the army was
repugnant to even radical Northerners, yet the white inhabitants were
Democratic almost to the last man, and if restored to civil rights would
control their States. The only means of developing a Southern Republican
party that might keep the South "loyal" was the enfranchisement of the
freedman, for which purpose the Fourteenth Amendment was submitted. The
agents of the Bureau were expected not only to feed and clothe the
negroes, but to impress upon them the fact that they owed their freedom
to the Republicans. Some spread the belief that the Democrats desired to
restore slavery. Many built up personal machines. The responsibility
upon these white directors of the negro vote was great, and was too
often betrayed. Generally not natives, and with no stake in the Southern
community, they lined their own pockets and earned the unkindly name of
"carpet-baggers." The Territories had always known something of this
type of ruler, but the States, hitherto, had known bad government only
when they made it themselves.
The Reconstruction Acts of 1867 ordered the President to divide the
South into five military districts, whose commanders should supersede
all the state officers whom Johnson had restored. With troops behind
them, these commanders were, first, to enroll on the voting list all
males over twenty-one. The negroes, before the adoption of the
Fourteenth Amendment, were thus given by Congress the right to vote in
their respective States, and were included in the lists. Excluded from
the lists were the leaders of every Southern community, those whites who
had held important office in the Confederacy; and none was to be
enrolled, white or black, until he had taken an ironclad and offensive
oath of allegiance.
Based upon the list of voters thus made up, state conventions were to be
summoned to revise the constitutions. In every case they must modify the
laws to admit the status of the freedmen, must ratify the Fourteenth
Amendment with its guaranty of civil rights, and must extend the right
of suffrage to the blacks. When all these things had been done, with
army officers constantly in supervision, the resulting constitutions
were to be submitted to Congress for final approval or rejection.
No constitutional theory ever met all the problems of reconstruction.
The war had been fought on the basis that no State can get out of the
Union. If this was true, then all the States were still States, and it
was a reasonable presidential function to restore order and withdraw the
troops. The unreasonable result of this theory was the immediate
restoration of an enlarged influence to those very men who had tried to
break the Union, at a moment when the greenback movement threatened the
foundations of public faith. Yet Congress, by pretending to readmit or
restore States, denied that they were still States, and by implication
conceded the principle for which the Confederacy had contended: that the
members of the Union could get outside it. The power of Congress to seat
or unseat members, however, placed it beyond all control. Every effort
to get the courts to interfere broke down, when the suits were directed
against the President (Mississippi _vs._ Andrew Johnson), or the
Secretary of War (Georgia _vs._ Stanton). A personal suit that promised
some relief (_Ex parte_ McCardle) was evaded by a sudden amendment of
the law relating to appeals. The situation was unpremeditated, and the
Constitution made no provision for its facts. In the end, reconstruction
must be judged by its results rather than by its legality. If it brought
peace, restored prosperity, safeguarded the Union, and created no new
grievances of its own, it was good, whatever the Constitution.
Johnson enforced the Reconstruction Acts with care, and the Southern
conventions, meeting in the autumn of 1867, sat into the following
winter. In five of the States the roll of electors showed a majority of
negroes, and in none were conservatives able to control the election of
delegates. The old leaders were still disfranchised, and many of them
could not believe that the North would permit the radicals to subject
them to the control of illiterate negroes. The resulting conventions
contained many negroes and were dominated by white Republicans,
carpet-baggers, or scalawags as the case might be. An active part in
directing them was taken by the officers of the Freedmen's Bureau, while
the freedmen were consolidated by the secret ritual of the Union League.
Only Tennessee escaped the ordeal, she having ratified the Fourteenth
Amendment so promptly that Congress could not evade admitting her in
1866.
An analysis of the conventions of 1867 reveals the extent of the
political revolution which Congress intended to thrust upon the South,
whose industrial revolution was now well advanced. Planters had begun
already to break up their estates and entrust small holdings to cash
renters, or share tenants, known as "croppers." Their financial burdens
were heavy, but with intelligent government and reasonable commercial
credits from the North, the problems of labor and capital might be met.
But the men who must control the economic future of the South were
excluded from the Government as traitors. Their places were filled by
Northern adventurers and by negroes. The Mississippi convention included
seventeen negroes, and was called the "black and tan." Inexperience and
incompetence were in control, leading to extravagance and dishonesty,
but the conventions were generally superior to the legislatures which
followed them.
Framing new constitutions, most of the States had met the demands of
Congress by the summer of 1868, with the respectable portion of the
South looking on in desperate silence. The war had left no grievances
equal to those now being suffered. Seven of the new constitutions were
adopted in time for the radicals to give to their States votes in the
election of 1868. Alabama, making the eighth, was allowed to vote under
a constitution which Congress had forced upon her after it had failed of
ratification by the people. Only Georgia and Louisiana, of these eight,
did not give their votes to Grant. Only Virginia, Mississippi, and Texas
remained without the pale when Grant was inaugurated in 1869.
The completion of reconstruction in its formal sense was reached during
Grant's first Congress. Mississippi completed her process in February,
1870. She had in 1868 voted down the reconstruction constitution, taking
courage in the leadership of a conservative governor, Humphreys. When he
was removed, and replaced by a Northern governor, the conservatives lost
heart and ratified the constitution that they had rejected. Their delay
cost the State one more humiliation, since in the interval the
Fifteenth Amendment had been submitted by Congress and made a condition
of readmission for the recalcitrant States. A Republican legislature,
the first fruit of reconstruction, accepted this and sent to Washington
as the new Mississippi Senators the Northern military governor, Ames,
and a negro preacher named Revels.
Virginia was readmitted in January, 1870. Her original loyal government
under Pierpont, which Lincoln had respected, had been supplanted by a
military regime, having lost its last chance for recognition when it
rejected the Fourteenth Amendment in 1867. Under congressional direction
a negro-radical convention made a new constitution which was forced upon
the people in January, 1870. Texas, too, was in her final stage of
restoration in 1870, and like Virginia and Mississippi was readmitted
upon conditions that had become more onerous since the passage of the
Reconstruction Acts in 1867.
Eleven States, all the old Confederacy, had been restored by the spring
of 1870; but one, Georgia, was ejected after restoration, and thus
became the last item in congressional reconstruction. In 1868 Georgia
had ratified her new constitution and moved her capital from its
ante-bellum location at Milledgeville to the new town growing upon the
ashes of Atlanta. She had ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, but her
first legislature had so poorly read the meaning of Congress that it
expelled every negro whom the radicals had elected to membership.
Congress had thereupon declined to seat the Georgia delegation at
Washington, and had renewed the probationary period until the
legislature, humbled and browbeaten, had undone the expulsion, whereupon
Georgia received her final recognition.
The arbitrary acts of Congress, passed by the radicals over the
unvarying vetoes of Johnson, find little sanction in the Constitution,
but it is to be expected that the laws should suffer in a time of war.
Congress held off the day of restoration until it saw in the South what
its majority believed to be loyal governments. Its majority could not
believe that any party but its own was loyal, and was thus led to a
policy much more debatable than that of actual reconstruction. Step by
step it moved. The abolition of slavery, in the Thirteenth Amendment
(effective December 18, 1865), was expected by all and accepted without
a fight. The next amendment, inspired by a fear that the freedmen would
be oppressed and by a hope that they might be converted into a political
ally of the Republicans, was submitted to the States before the
Reconstruction Acts were passed, and was proclaimed as part of the
Constitution July 28, 1868. Only compulsion upon the Southern States
procured its ratification. It left negro suffrage optional with the
States, but threatened them with a reduction in representation in
Congress if they refrained from granting it. In the Southern States
Congress had already planted a negro electorate by law. The Fifteenth
Amendment forbade the denial of the right to vote on grounds of race,
color, or previous condition of servitude, and was not submitted to the
States until after the inauguration of General Grant. A fear that the
South would disfranchise the freedmen, pay the price, and revert to
Democratic control seems to have been the prime motive in its adoption.
When it was proclaimed, March 30, 1870, the radical Republicans had done
everything in their power to save themselves, and had inflicted on the
conquered States, in malice, ignorance, or mistaken philanthropy, a
condition that in the North, with its trifling number of negroes, was
tolerated with reluctance.
The South was in name completely restored in 1870, but neither
restoration nor reconstruction was in fact far advanced. In the latter
process it was yet clearing away the wreckage of the institution of
slavery, breaking up the plantations, devising new systems of tenure and
wage, rebuilding the material equipment that the war had left desolate.
The former process was only commenced. It was unthinkable that an
American community should permit itself to remain subject to the
absolute control of its least respected members, yet this was the aim of
white disfranchisement and negro suffrage. Law or no law, the
restoration of the South was not complete until its government was back
in the control of its responsible white population.
Almost without exception, until 1870, the Southern State Governments
were what Congress had chosen to make them. Their Senators and
Representatives in Congress were Republican, commonly of the carpet-bag
variety. Their governors, administrative officers, and legislatures were
Republican, too. Rarely were they persons of property or standing in
their communities, and often, as their records show, they were both
black and illiterate. Had all possessed good intentions they could
hardly have hoped to meet the local needs, which called for a wise
revision of law in order that the community might recover and live. That
their work should be accompanied by error and waste was inevitable.
From the contemporary accounts of travelers in the South, from public
documents, from the growing body of Southern biography and reminiscence,
it is easy to gather a mass of detail upon the extravagance of the
Reconstruction Governments. Printing bills and salary lists rose without
a corresponding increase in service done. When expenditures exceeded the
revenues, loans were created carelessly and recklessly. For negroes,
only a few months out of the cotton-field, there was an irresistible
attraction in the plush carpets, the mahogany desks, and the imported
cuspidors that the taxpayers might be forced to provide for the comfort
of their servants. A free and continuous lunch, with ample food and
drink, was set up in one of the capitols. Gratuitous waste was the least
of the burdens inflicted upon the South.
It is unreasonable to lay all the corruption of the Reconstruction
Governments to the account of the congressional policy. The period of
the Civil War was one of abuse of power by local officials everywhere.
It took a Tweed in New York to drive a Northern public to revolt, and a
Nast to focus public attention upon the crime. In other States, where
rogues were less brutal in their methods, or prosecutors less acute, the
evil ran, not unnoticed but unchecked. In the South the same phenomena
were resented with greater vigor than in the North because the crimes
were more openly and clumsily committed, and because they were the work
of "outsiders."
Deliberate theft of public money was so common as to occasion no
surprise. In no State were books so kept that the modern student can be
sure he knows where all the money went. Graft in contracts, fraud in the
administration of schools and negro-relief schemes, sale of charters and
votes, illegal issues of bonds, improvident loans to railroads, combined
to enrich the office-holder and to increase the volume of public debts.
A long series of repudiations of these debts injured Southern credit for
many years. South Carolina occasioned the most vivid description of the
orgy in a book entitled _The Prostrate State_, by a Maine abolitionist
and Republican, named Pike; but several other States would have
furnished similar materials to a similar historian.
So far as law was concerned, the South was helpless in those regions in
which the negroes approached a majority. The military garrisons which
Congress kept on duty saw to it that the freedmen were protected, yet
were unable in the long run to control the white population. It is a
vexed question whether negro violence or white was the first to appear,
but by 1867 events had begun to point the way to the elimination of
negro control by force or fraud. By law it could not be destroyed unless
the whites struggled and argued for negro votes, treating the negroes as
citizens and equals, which was generally as impossible as an acceptance
of their control.
The Ku-Klux Klan was a secret movement, with slight organization, that
appeared earliest in Tennessee, but spread to nearly every crossroads in
the South. It began in the hazing of negroes and carpet-baggers who were
insolent or offensive to their neighbors. Its members rode by night, in
mask, with improvised pomp and ritual, and played as much upon the
imagination of their victims as upon their bodies. Frequently it
revenged private grievances and went to extremes of violence or murder.
From hazing it was an easy step to intimidation at election time, the
Ku-Klux Klan proving to be an efficient means of reducing the negro
vote. It was so efficient, indeed, that Grant asked and Congress voted,
in 1871, special powers for the policing of the South. In this summer a
committee of Congress visited Southern centers and accumulated a great
mass of testimony from which a picture of both the Ku-Klux Klan outrages
and the workings of reconstruction may easily be drawn. The reign of
terror subsided by 1872, but it had done much to dissuade the negro from
using his new right, and had started the movement for home rule in the
South.
That the normal politics of the South was Democratic is shown by the
votes of the border States, where a population of freedmen had to be
assimilated and Congress could not interfere. Delaware, Maryland, and
Kentucky voted against Grant in 1868, although all the restored
Confederate States but two voted for him. In Georgia the Democrats
swallowed their pride, electioneered among the negroes, and elected a
conservative State Government in 1870. Tennessee escaped negro
domination from the start. Virginia, late to be readmitted, had
consolidated her white population as she watched the troubles in South
Carolina and Mississippi, and never elected a radical administration. In
North Carolina, after a fight that approached a civil war, a Democratic
State Government was chosen in 1870. The rest of the Confederate States
followed as opportunity offered; after 1872 the process was rapid, and
after 1876 there was no Republican administration in the old South. The
Republican party, itself, almost disappeared from the South at this
time. A bare organization, largely manned by negroes, endured to enjoy
the offices which a Republican National Administration could bestow, and
to contribute pliant delegations to the national conventions of the
party. But the South had become solid in the sense that its votes were
recorded almost automatically for the Democratic ticket.
[Illustration: THE SOLID SOUTH 1880-1912
Within the shaded area every electoral vote was cast for the Democratic
presidential candidate between 1880 and 1892; since 1892 the heavily
shaded area has continued solidly Democratic, while the border States
have occasionally cast Republican votes.]
Force and fraud played a large part in the restoration of white control,
but it could not have been effective without some connivance from the
North. Before 1872 the keenness of Northern radicalism was blunted.
Thoughtful Republicans began to examine their work and criticize it. "We
can never reconstruct the South," wrote Lowell, "except through its own
leading men, nor ever hope to have them on our side till we make it for
their interest and compatible with their honor to be so." A social order
which needed the constant support of troops lost the confidence of
political independents. These, as the presidential campaign of 1872 drew
near, openly expressed their hostility to reconstruction as carried out
by Grant, and threatened to prevent his reelection.
The first term of Grant ended unsatisfactorily. His appointments to
office were marked by favoritism and incapacity. He appointed the only
really inferior man who has ever represented the United States in
London,--one who thought it not incompatible with his high office to
publish a treatise on draw-poker, and to appear as bellwether in a
mining prospectus. Grant's personal intimates included shifty
financiers. Corruption and misgovernment at the South were held against
him, though Congress was properly to blame for them. Only in his stand
for honest finance, his effort to improve the Indian service, and his
conclusion of the disputes with Great Britain, could his supporters take
great pride.
The settlement with England was his greatest achievement. Since the
summer of 1862, when the Alabama had evaded the British officials and
had gone to sea, the American Minister in London had continued to press
for damages. The Alabama claims were based on the assertion that the law
of neutrals required Great Britain to prevent any hostile vessel from
starting, in her waters, upon a cruise against the United States. In the
face of official rebuff and popular sneers Charles Francis Adams
formulated the claims. His successor, Reverdy Johnson, reached a sort of
settlement which the Senate declined to ratify, and which Sumner
denounced. It was Sumner's contention that the Civil War was prolonged
by British aid and that a demand for national damages (perhaps
$2,000,000,000, or Canada, by way of substitute) ought to be advanced.
So tense did the international situation become in 1869 and 1870 that
friends of peace were frightened. Boundaries, fisheries, and general
claims aggravated the situation, which was given into the hands of a
Joint High Commission, hastily summoned to meet in Washington in 1870.
The resulting Treaty of Washington, and the successful arbitrations
which followed it, eliminated Sumner's extreme contention but vindicated
the main American claims and founded Anglo-American relations on a more
secure basis than they had ever known. It was Grant's great triumph, but
it was a political danger as well, for the negotiator in charge, Charles
Francis Adams, loomed up as the possible presidential candidate of the
Republican dissenters.
The Liberal Republicans included the enemies of Grant as well as
dissatisfied reformers of all sorts. Carl Schurz, the great
German-American independent, was their leader. Horace Greeley, whose
_Tribune_ had done much to make the Republican party possible, gave them
his support. Charles Francis Adams was not indifferent to them. Salmon
P. Chase wanted their nomination. Young newspaper men, like Whitelaw
Reid and Henry Watterson, tried to control them. And the new group of
civil service reformers, disappointed in Grant, hoped that the new party
would take a step toward better government. At Cincinnati, in May, 1872,
they met in mass convention, and nominated Horace Greeley and Gratz
Brown. Their platform denounced Republican reconstruction, urged the
return to self-government in the South, and advocated civil service
reform, specie payments, and maintenance of public credit. The schism
became more threatening when the Democrats saw a chance through fusion,
and nominated the same candidates at Baltimore in July.
No quainter political figure has appeared in America than Horace
Greeley, thus transferred from his editorial office to the stump. Long
used to the freedom of the press, he had advocated many things in his
lifetime, had examined and exploited unpopular social reforms, had
contradicted himself and retraced his tracks repeatedly. The biting
cartoons of Nast exploited all these; but no contrast was so absurd as
that which brought to the great denouncer of slavery and the South the
support of the party of the South.
The Republican Convention renominated Grant at Philadelphia without
opposition, refused Colfax a second term, and picked Henry Wilson for
Vice-President. Its platform, as in 1868, was retrospective, taking
pride in its great achievements and assuming full credit for the war,
reconstruction, and financial honor. It offered its ticket to all the
States for the first time since 1860, and elected Grant with ease. The
inharmonious Democrat-Liberal-Republican alliance increased the
Republican majority, but the returns from the South confirmed the
suspicion that home rule was in sight.
Restored completely to themselves, four years later, the Southern
Governments ceased to play much part in national affairs and continued
the economic rebuilding of their region. It was thirty years after the
war before the South, in population and business, had recovered from its
devastation, and even then it was far from subordinating its local
politics to national issues.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
The writings of Rhodes and Dunning contain the best comprehensive
accounts of political reconstruction. For greater detail, the series of
doctoral dissertations on reconstruction in the several States, directed
by Professor Dunning and printed generally in the Columbia University
Studies, has great value. In W.L. Fleming, _Documentary History of
Reconstruction_ (2 vols., 1906), important selections from the sources
have been printed; the same writer's _Civil War and Reconstruction in
Alabama_ (1905) is the best account of the process in a single State.
J.A. Woodburn, _Thaddeus Stevens_, is useful. The old and new economic
systems of the South receive their keenest interpretation in the works
of U.B. Phillips and A.H. Stone. The _Annual Cyclopaedia_ continues
valuable; the Report of the Ku-Klux Committee is invaluable (42d
Congress, 2d Session, Senate Report, No. 41, 13 vols.). _Harper's
Weekly_, which supported Grant in 1872, was the most prominent journal
of the period. C.F. Adams, Jr., has contributed to the diplomatic
history of these years his _Charles Francis Adams_ (1900, in American
Statesmen Series), and his "Treaty of Washington" (in _Lee and
Appomattox_, 1902). Elaborate details of the arbitrations are in J.B.
Moore, _History and Digest of the International Arbitrations to which
the United States has been a Party_ (6 vols., 1898). An interesting
series of recollections of reconstruction events, by Watterson, Reid,
Edmunds, and others, was printed in the _Century Magazine_ during 1913.