CHAPTER V

THE RECONSTRUCTION OF FREEDOM

How the black fugitive, soldier and freedman after the Civil

War helped to restore the Union, establish public schools,

enfranchise the poor white and initiate industrial democracy in

America.

There have been four great steps toward democracy taken in America:

The refusal to be taxed by the English Parliament; the escape from

European imperialism; the discarding of New England aristocracy; and the

enfranchisement of the Negro slave.

What did the Emancipation of the slave really mean? It meant such

property rights as would give him a share in the income of southern

industry large enough to support him as a modern free laborer; and such

a legal status as would enable him by education and experience to bear

his responsibility as a worker and citizen. This was an enormous task

and meant the transformation of a slave holding oligarchy into a modern

industrial democracy.

Who could do this? Some thought it done by the Emancipation Proclamation

and the 13th amendment and Garrison with naive faith in bare law abruptly

stopped the issue of the _Liberator_ when the slave was declared “free.”

The Negro was not freed by edict or sentiment but by the Abolitionists

backed by the persistent action of the slave himself as fugitive, soldier

and voter.

Slavery was the cause of the war. There might have been other questions

large enough and important enough to have led to a disruption of the

Union but none have successfully done so except slavery. But the North

fought for union and not against slavery and for a long time it refused

to recognize that the Civil War was essentially a war against Negro

slavery. Abraham Lincoln said to Horace Greeley as late as August, 1862,

“If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the

same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object

is to save the Union and not either to save or destroy slavery.”

Despite this attitude it was evident very soon that the Nation was

fighting against the symptom of disease and not against the cause. If we

look at the action of the North taken by itself, we find these singular

contradictions: They fought for the Union; they suddenly emancipated the

slave; they enfranchised the Freedmen; they abandoned the Freedmen. If

now this had been the deliberate action of the North it would have been a

crazy program; but it was not. The action of the American Negro himself

forced the nation into many of these various contradictions; and the

motives of the Negro were primarily economic. He was trying to achieve

economic emancipation. And it is this fact that makes Reconstruction one

of the greatest attempts to spread democracy which the modern world has

seen.

There were in the South in 1860, 3,838,765 Negro slaves and 258,346

free Negroes. The question of land and fugitive slaves had precipitated

the war: that is, if slavery was to survive it had to have more slave

territory, and this the North refused. Moreover if slavery was to survive

the drain of fugitive slaves must stop or the slave trade be reopened.

The North refused to consider the reopening of the slave trade and only

half-heartedly enforced the fugitive slave laws.

No sooner then did the war open in April, 1861, than two contradictory

things happened: Fugitive slaves began to come into the lines of the

Union armies at the very time that Union Generals were assuring the South

that slavery would not be interfered with. In Virginia, Colonel Tyler

said “The relation of master and servant as recognized in your state

shall be respected.” At Port Royal, General T. W. Sherman declared that

he would not interfere with “Your social and local institution.” Dix in

Virginia refused to admit fugitive slaves within his lines and Halleck in

Missouri excluded them. Later, both Buell at Nashville and Hooker on the

upper Potomac allowed their camps to be searched by masters for fugitive

slaves.[143]

Against this attitude, however, there appeared, even in the first year

of the War, some unanswerable considerations. For instance three slaves

escaped into General Butler’s lines at Fortress Monroe just as they were

about to be sent to North Carolina to work on Confederate fortifications.

Butler immediately said “These men are contraband of war, set them at

work.” Butler’s action was sustained.[144] But when Fremont, in August

freed the slaves of Missouri under martial law, declaring it an act

of war, Lincoln hastened to repudiate his action;[145] and the same

thing happened the next year when Hunter at Hilton Head, S. C. declared

“Slavery and martial law in a free country ... incompatible.”[146]

Nevertheless here loomed difficulty and the continued coming of the

fugitive slaves increased the difficulty and forced action.

The year 1862 saw the fugitive slave recognized as a worker and helper

within the Union lines and eventually as a soldier bearing arms.

Thousands of black men during that year, of all ages and both sexes,

clad in rags and with their bundles on their backs, gathered wherever

the Union Army gained foothold—at Norfolk, Hampton, at Alexandria and

Nashville and along the border towards the West. There was sickness and

hunger and some crime but everywhere there was desire for employment.

It was in vain that Burnside was insisting that slavery was not to be

touched and that McClellan repeated this on his Peninsular Campaign.

A change of official attitude began to appear as indeed it had to. When

for instance General Saxton, with headquarters at Beauford, S. C., took

military control of that district, he began to establish market houses

for the sale of produce from the plantations and to put the Negroes to

work as wage laborers. When, in the West, Grant’s army occupied Grand

Junction, Mississippi and a swarm of fugitives appeared, naked and

hungry, some were employed as teamsters, servants and cooks and finally

Grant appointed a “Chief of Negro affairs” for the entire district

under his jurisdiction. Crops were harvested, wages paid, wood cutters

swarmed in forests to furnish fuel for the Federal gun-boats, cabins were

erected and a regular “Freedmen’s Bureau” came gradually into operation.

The Negroes thus employed as regular helpers and laborers in the army,

swelled to more than 200,000 before the end of the war; and if we count

transient workers and spies who helped with information, the number

probably reached a half million.

If now the Negro could work for the Union Army why could he not also

fight? We have seen in the last chapter how the nation hesitated and then

yielded in 1862. The critical Battle of Antietam took place September

17th and the confederate avalanche was checked. Five days later, Abraham

Lincoln proclaimed that he was going to recommend an appropriation

by Congress for encouraging the gradual abolition of slavery through

payment for the slaves; and that on the following January 1st, in all the

territory which was still at war with the United States, he proposed to

declare the slaves free as a military measure.[147] Thus the year 1862

saw the Negro as an active worker in the army and as a soldier.

This fact together with the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1st,

made the year 1863 a significant year. Not only were most of the

slaves legally freed by military edict but by the very fact of their

emancipation the stream of fugitives became a vast flood. The Army had to

organize departments and appoint officials for the succor and guidance of

these fugitives in their work; relief on a large scale began to appear

from the North and the demand of the Negro for education began to be felt

in the starting of schools here and there.

“The fugitives poured into the lines and gradually were used as laborers

and helpers. Immediately teaching began and gradually schools sprang up.

When at last the Emancipation Proclamation was issued and Negro soldiers

called for, it was necessary to provide more systematically for Negroes.

Various systems and experiments grew up here and there. The Freedmen

were massed in large numbers at Fortress Monroe, Va., Washington, D. C.,

Beaufort and Port Royal, S. C., New Orleans, La., Vicksburg and Corinth,

Miss., Columbus, Ky., Cairo, Ill., and elsewhere. In such places schools

immediately sprang up under the army officers and chaplains. The most

elaborate system, perhaps, was that under General Banks in Louisiana.

It was established in 1863 and soon had a regular Board of Education,

which laid and collected taxes and supported eventually nearly a hundred

schools with ten thousand pupils, under 162 teachers. At Port Royal,

S. C., were gathered Edward L. Pierce’s ‘Ten Thousand Clients’.... In

the west, General Grant appointed Colonel John Eaton, afterwards United

States Commissioner of Education to be Superintendent of Freedmen

in 1862. He sought to consolidate and regulate the schools already

established and succeeded in organizing a large system.”[148]

The Treasury Department of the Government, solicitous for the cotton

crop, took charge of certain plantations in order to encourage the

workers and preserve the crop. Thus during the Spring of 1863, there were

groups of Freedmen and refugees in long broken lines between the two

armies reaching from Maryland to the Kansas border and down the coast

from Norfolk to New Orleans.

In 1864 a significant action took place: the petty and insulting

discrimination in the pay of white and colored soldiers was stopped.

The Negro began to be a free man and the center of the problem

of Emancipation became land and organized industry. Eaton, the

Superintendent of Freedmen reports, July 15, for his particular district:

“These Freedmen are now disposed of as follows: In military service as

soldiers’ laundresses, cooks, officers’ servants and laborers in the

various staff departments, 41,150; in cities, on plantations and in

freedmen’s villages and cared for, 72,500. Of these 62,300 are entirely

self-supporting—the same as any individual class anywhere else—as

planters, mechanics, barbers, hackmen, draymen, etc., conducting on

their own responsibility or working as hired laborers. The remaining

10,200 receive subsistence from the government. Three thousand of them

are members of families whose heads are carrying on plantations and have

under cultivation 4,000 acres of cotton. They are to pay the government

for their subsistence from the first income of the crop. The other 7,200

include the paupers, that is to say, all Negroes over and under the

self-supporting age, the crippled and sick in hospitals, of the 113,650,

and those engaged in their care. Instead of being unproductive this class

has now under cultivation 500 acres of corn, 970 acres of vegetables

and 1,500 acres of cotton besides working at wood-chopping and other

industries. There are reported in the aggregate over 100,000 acres of

cotton under cultivation. Of these about 7,000 acres are leased and

cultivated by blacks. Some Negroes are managing as high as 300 or 400

acres....”[149]

The experiment at Davis Bend, Mississippi, was of especial interest:

“Late in the season—in November and December, 1864,—the Freedmen’s

Department was restored to full control over the camps and plantations

on President’s Island and Palmyra or Davis Bend. Both these points had

been originally occupied at the suggestion of General Grant and were

among the most successful of our enterprises for the Negroes. With

the expansion of the lessee system, private interests were allowed to

displace the interest of the Negroes whom we had established there under

the protection of the government, but orders issued by General N. J. T.

Dana, upon whose sympathetic and intelligent co-operation my officers

could always rely, restored to us the full control of these lands. The

efforts of the freedmen on Davis Bend were particularly encouraging, and

this property under Colonel Thomas’ able direction, became in reality the

“Negro Paradise” that General Grant had urged us to make of it.”[150]

The United States Treasury went further in overseeing Freedmen and

abandoned lands and appointed special agents over “Freedmen’s home

colonies.” Down the Mississippi Valley, General Thomas issued a

lengthy series of instructions covering industry. He appointed three

Commissioners to lease plantations and care for the employees; fixed the

rate of wages and taxed cotton. At Newbern, N. C., there were several

thousand refugees to whom land was assigned and about 800 houses rented.

After Sherman’s triumphant March to the Sea, Secretary Stanton himself

went to Savannah to investigate the condition of the Negroes.

It was significant that even this early Abraham Lincoln himself was

suggesting limited Negro suffrage. Already he was thinking of the

reconstruction of the states; Louisiana had been in Union hands for two

years and Lincoln wrote to Governor Hahn, March 13th, 1864: “Now you are

about to have a convention, which, ... will probably define the elective

franchise. I barely suggest, for your private consideration, whether

some of the colored people may not be let in, as, for instance, the very

intelligent, and especially those who have fought gallantly in our ranks.

They would probably help, in some trying time to come, to keep the jewel

of liberty within the family of freedom. But this is only a suggestion,

not to the public, but to you alone.”[151]

Here again the development had been logical. The Negroes were voting

in many Northern states. At least one-half million of them were taking

part in the war, nearly 200,000 as armed soldiers. They were beginning

to be reorganized in industry by the army officials as free laborers.

Naturally the question must come sooner or later: Could they be expected

to maintain their freedom, either political or economic, unless they had

a vote? And Lincoln with rare foresight saw this several months before

the end of the war.

The year 1865 brought fully to the front the question of Negro suffrage

and Negro free labor. They were recognized January 16th, when Sherman

settled large numbers of Negroes on the Sea Islands. His order said:

“The Islands from Charleston, south, the abandoned rice fields along the

rivers for thirty miles from the sea, and the country bordering the St.

John’s river, Florida, are reserved and set apart for the settlement of

the Negroes now made free by the acts of war and the proclamation of the

President of the United States.

“At Beaufort, Hilton Head, Savannah, Fernandina, St. Augustine, and

Jacksonville, the blacks may remain in their chosen or accustomed

vocations but on the islands, and in the settlements hereafter to be

established, no white person whatever, unless military officers and

soldiers detailed for duty, will be permitted to reside; and the sole

and exclusive management of affairs will be left to the freed people

themselves, subject only to the United States military authority and

the acts of Congress. By the laws of war and orders of the President of

the United States the Negro is free, and must be dealt with as such.

He cannot be subjected to conscription or forced military service,

save by the written orders of the highest military authority of the

department, under such regulations as the President or Congress may

prescribe. Domestic servants, blacksmiths, carpenters, and other

mechanics, will be free to select their own work and residence, but the

young and able-bodied Negroes must be encouraged to enlist as soldiers

in the service of the United States, to contribute their share towards

maintaining their own freedom, and securing their rights as citizens of

the United States.

“Whenever three respectable Negroes, heads of families shall desire to

settle on lands, and shall have selected for that purpose an island

or a locality clearly defined, within the limits above designated,

the Inspector of Settlements and Plantations will himself, or by such

subordinate officer as he may appoint, give them a license to settle

such island or district, and afford them such assistance as he can to

enable them to establish a peaceful agricultural settlement. The three

parties named will subdivide the land, under the supervision of the

Inspector, among themselves and such others as may choose to settle near

them, so that each family shall have a plot of not more than forty (40)

acres of tillable ground, and when it borders on some water channel,

with not more than 800 feet water front, in the possession of which land

the military authorities will afford them protection until such time

as they can protect themselves, or until Congress shall regulate their

title.”[152]

On March 3, 1865 the Nation came to the parting of the ways. Two measures

passed Congress on this momentous date. First, a Freedmen’s Bank was

incorporated at Washington “to receive on deposit therefore, by or on

behalf of persons heretofore held in slavery in the United States or

their descendants, and investing the same in the stocks, bonds, Treasury

notes, or other securities of the United States.”[153] The first year it

had $300,000 of deposits and the deposits increased regularly until in

1871 there were nearly $20,000,000. Also on March 3rd, the Freedmen’s

Bureau Act was passed. The war was over. Sometime the South must have

restored home rule. When that came what would happen to the freedmen?

These paths were before the nation:

1. They might abandon the freedman to the mercy of his former masters.

2. They might for a generation or more make the freedmen the wards of

the nation—protecting them, encouraging them, educating their children,

giving them land and a minimum of capital and thus inducting them into

real economic and political freedom.

3. They might force a grant of Negro suffrage, support the Negro voters

for a brief period and then with hands off let them sink or swim.

The second path was the path of wisdom and statesmanship. But the country

would not listen to such a comprehensive plan. If the form of this Bureau

had been worked out by Charles Sumner today instead of sixty years ago,

it would have been regarded as a proposal far less revolutionary than

the modern labor legislation of America and Europe. A half-century ago,

however, and in a country which gave the _laisser-faire_ economics

their extremest trial the Freedmen’s Bureau struck the whole nation as

unthinkable save as a very temporary expedient and to relieve the more

pointed forms of distress following war. Yet the proposals of the Bureau

as actually established by the laws of 1865 and 1866 were both simple and

sensible:

1. To oversee the making and enforcement of wage contracts.

2. To appear in the courts as the freedmen’s best friend.

3. To furnish the freedmen with a minimum of land and of capital.

4. To establish schools.

5. To furnish such institutions of relief as hospitals, outdoor stations,

etc.

How a sensible people could expect really to conduct a slave into freedom

with less than this is hard to see. Of course even with such tutelage

extending over a period of two or three decades the ultimate end had to

be enfranchisement and political and social freedom for those freedmen

who attained a certain set standard. Otherwise the whole training had

neither object nor guarantee.

Naturally the Bureau was no sooner established than it faced implacable

enemies. The white South naturally opposed to a man because it

practically abolished private profit in the exploitation of labor. To

step from slave to free labor was economic catastrophe in the opinion of

the white South: but to step further to free labor organized primarily

for the laborers’ benefit, this not only was unthinkable for the white

South but it even touched the economic sensibilities of the white

North. Already the nation owed a staggering debt. It would not face any

large increase for such a purpose. Moreover, who could conduct such an

enterprise? It would have taxed in ordinary times the ability and self

sacrifice of the nation to have found men in sufficient quantity who

could and would have conducted honestly and efficiently such a tremendous

experiment in human uplift. And these were not ordinary times.

Nevertheless a bureau had to be established at least temporarily as a

clearing house for the numberless departments of the armies dealing with

freedmen and holding land and property in their name.

As General Howard, the head of the Bureau said, this Bureau was really a

government and partially ruled the South from the close of the war until

1870. “It made laws, executed them and interpreted them. It laid and

collected taxes, defined and punished crime, maintained and used military

force and dictated such measures as it thought necessary and proper for

the accomplishment of its varied ends.” Its establishment was a herculean

task both physically and socially, and it accomplished a great work

before it was repudiated. Carl Schurz in 1864 felt warranted in saying,

“Not half of the labor that has been done in the South this year, or will

be done there next year, would have been or would be done but for the

exertions of the Freedmen’s Bureau.... No other agency, except one placed

there by the national government, could have wielded the moral power

whose interposition was so necessary to prevent the Southern society

from falling at once into the chaos of a general collision between its

different elements.”[154]

The nation knew, however, that the Freedmen’s Bureau was temporary. What

should follow it? The attitude of the South was not reassuring. Carl

Schurz reported that: “Some planters held back their former slaves on

their plantations by brute force. Armed bands of white men patrolled the

country roads to drive back the Negroes wandering about. Dead bodies

of murdered Negroes were found on and near the highways and by-paths.

Gruesome reports came from the hospitals—reports of colored men and women

whose ears had been cut off, whose skulls had been broken by blows, whose

bodies had been slashed by knives or lacerated by scourges. A number of

such cases I had occasion to examine myself. A veritable reign of terror

prevailed in many parts of the South. The Negro found scant justice in

the local courts against the white man. He could look for protection only

to the military forces of the United States still garrisoning the ‘states

lately in rebellion’ and to the Freedmen’s Bureau.”

The determination to reconstruct the South without recognizing the Negro

as a voter was manifest. The provisional governments set up by Lincoln

and Johnson were based on white male suffrage. In Louisiana for instance,

where free Negroes had wealth and prestige and had furnished thousands of

soldiers under the proposed reconstruction and despite Lincoln’s tactful

suggestion—“Not one Negro was allowed to vote, though at that very time

the wealthy, intelligent free colored people of the State paid taxes

on property assessed at $15,000,000 and many of them were well known

for their patriotic zeal and love for the Union. Thousands of colored

men whose homes were in Louisiana served bravely in the national army

and navy and many of the so-called Negroes in New Orleans could not be

distinguished by the most intelligent strangers from the best class of

white gentlemen either by color or manner, dress or language; still, as

it was known by tradition and common fame that they were not of pure

Caucasian descent, they could not vote.”[155]

Johnson feared this Southern program and like Lincoln suggested limited

Negro suffrage. August 15th, 1865, he wrote to Governor Sharkey of

Mississippi: “If you could extend the elective franchise to all persons

of color who can read the Constitution of the United States in English

and write their names, and to all persons of color who own real estate

valued at not less than two hundred and fifty dollars, and pay taxes

thereon, you would completely disarm the adversary and set an example

the other states will follow. This you can do with perfect safety and

you thus place the Southern States, in reference to free persons of

color, upon the same basis with the free States. I hope and trust your

convention will do this.”[156]

The answer of the South to all such suggestions was the celebrated “Black

Codes”: “Alabama declared ‘stubborn or refractory servants’ or ‘those

who loiter away their time’ to be ‘vagrants’ who could be hired out at

compulsory service by law, while all Negro minors, far from being sent

to school, were to be ‘apprenticed’ preferably to their father’s former

‘masters and mistresses.’ In Florida it was decreed that no Negro could

‘own, use or keep any bowie-knife, dirk, sword, firearms or ammunition of

any kind’ without a license from the Judge of Probate. In South Carolina

the Legislature declared that ‘no person of color shall pursue the

practice of art, trade or business of an artisan, mechanic or shopkeeper

or any other trade or employment besides that of husbandry or that of

servant under contract for labor until he shall have obtained a license

from the Judge of the District Court.’ Mississippi required that ‘if a

laborer shall quit the service of the employer before the expiration of

his term of service without just cause, he shall forfeit his wages for

that year.’ Louisiana said that ‘every adult freed man or woman shall

furnish themselves with a comfortable home and visible means of support

within twenty days after the passage of this act’ and that any failing to

do so should ‘be immediately arrested’, delivered to the court and ‘hired

out’ by public advertisement, to some citizen, being the highest bidder,

for the remainder year.”[157]

These Codes were not reassuring to the friends of freedom. To be sure it

was not a time to expect calm, cool, thoughtful action on the part of the

South. Its economic condition was pitiable. Property in slaves to the

extent perhaps of two thousand million dollars had suddenly disappeared.

One thousand five hundred more millions representing the Confederate war

debt, had largely disappeared. Large amounts of real estate and other

property had been destroyed, industry had been disorganized, 250,000 men

had been killed and many more maimed. With this went the moral effect of

an unsuccessful war with all its letting down of social standards and

quickening of hatred and discouragement—a situation which would make it

difficult under any circumstances to reconstruct a new government and

a new civilization. Moreover any human being of any color “doomed in

his own person and his posterity to live without knowledge and without

capacity to make anything his own and to toil that another may reap the

fruits,” is bound on sudden emancipation to loom like a great dread on

the horizon.

The fear of Negro freedom in the South was increased by its own

consciousness of guilt, yet it was reasonable to expect from it something

more than mere repression and reaction toward slavery. To some small

extent this expectation was fulfilled: the abolition of slavery was

recognized and the civil rights of owning property and appearing as a

witness in cases in which he was a party were generally granted the

Negro; yet with these went such harsh regulations as largely neutralized

the concessions and gave ground for the assumption that once free from

Northern control the South would virtually re-enslave the Negro. The

colored people themselves naturally feared this and protested, as in

Mississippi, “against the reactionary policy prevailing and expressing

the fear that the Legislature will pass such proscriptive laws as will

drive the freedmen from the State or practically re-enslave them.”[158]

As Professor Burgess (whom no one accuses of being Negrophile) says:

“Almost every act, word or gesture of the Negro not consonant with

good taste and good manners as well as good morals was made a crime or

misdemeanor, for which he could first be fined by the magistrates and

then be consigned to a condition of almost slavery for an indefinite time

if he could not pay the bill.”

All things considered, it seems probable that if the South had been

permitted to have its way in 1865 the harshness of Negro slavery would

have been mitigated so as to make slave trading difficult and to make it

possible for a Negro to hold property if he got any and to appear in some

cases in court; but that in most other respects the blacks would have

remained in slavery. And no small number of whites even in the North

were quite willing to contemplate such a solution.

In October, the democratic platform of Louisiana said “This is a

government of white people,” and although Johnson reported in December

that Reconstruction was complete in North and South Carolina, Georgia,

Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas and Tennessee, yet everyone

knew that the real problems of Reconstruction had just begun. The war

caused by slavery could be stopped only by a real abolition of slavery.

It was as though the Germans invading France had found flocking to their

camps the laboring forces of the invaded land, poor and destitute, but

willing to work and willing to fight. What would have been the attitude

of the successful invader when the war was ended? Gratitude alone

counseled help for the Freedmen; wisdom counseled a real abolition of

slavery; so far slavery had not been abolished in spite of the fact that

the 13th Amendment proposed in February had been proclaimed in December.

Freedom and citizenship were primarily a matter of state legislation;

and emancipation from slavery was an economic problem—a question of work

and wages, of land and capital—all these things were matters of state

legislation. Unless then something was done to insure a proper legal

status and legal protection for the Freedmen, the so-called abolition

of slavery would be but a name. Furthermore there were grave political

difficulties: According to the celebrated compromise in the Constitution,

three-fifths of the slaves were counted in the Southern states as a basis

of representation and this gave the white South as compared with the

North a large political advantage. This advantage was now to be increased

because, as freemen, the whole Negro population was to be counted and

still the voting was confined to whites. The North, therefore, found

themselves faced by the fact that the very people whom they had overcome

in a costly and bloody war were now coming back with increased political

power, with determination to keep just as much of slavery as they could

and with freedom to act toward the nation that they had nearly destroyed,

in whatever way the deep hatreds of a hurt and conquered people tempted

them to act. All this was sinister and dangerous. Assume as large minded

and forgiving an attitude as one could, either the abolition of slavery

must be made real or the war was fought in vain.

The Negroes themselves naturally began to insist that without political

power it was impossible to accomplish their economic freedom. Frederick

Douglass said to President Johnson: “Your noble and humane predecessor

placed in our hands the sword to assist in saving the nation and we do

hope that you, his able successor, will favorably regard the placing in

our hands the ballot with which to save ourselves.” And when Johnson

demurred on account of the hostility between blacks and poor whites, a

committee of prominent colored men replied:

“Even if it were true, as you allege, that the hostility of the blacks

toward the poor whites must necessarily project itself into a state of

freedom, and that this enmity between the two races is even more intense

in a state of freedom than in a state of slavery, in the name of heaven,

we reverently ask, how can you, in view of your professed desire to

promote the welfare of the black man, deprive him of all means of defense

and clothe him, whom you regard as his enemy, in the panoply of political

power?”[159]

Again as the Negro fugitive slave was already in camp before the nation

was ready to receive him and was even trying to drive him back to his

master; just as the Negro was already bearing arms before he was legally

recognized as a soldier; so too he was voting before Negro suffrage was

contemplated; to cite one instance at Davis Bend, Mississippi. “Early in

1865 a system was adopted for their government in which the freedmen

took a considerable part. The Bend was divided into districts, each

having a sheriff and judge appointed from among the more reliable and

intelligent colored men. A general oversight of the proceedings was

maintained by our officers in charge, who confirmed or modified the

findings of the court. The shrewdness of the colored judges was very

remarkable, though it was sometimes necessary to decrease the severity of

the punishment they proposed. Fines and penal service on the Home Farm

were the usual sentences they imposed. Petty theft and idleness were the

most frequent causes of trouble, but my officers were able to report

that exposed property was as safe on Davis Bend as it would be anywhere.

The community distinctly demonstrated the capacity of the Negro to take

care of himself and exercised under honest and competent direction the

functions of self-government.”[160]

Carl Schurz said in his celebrated report: “The emancipation of the

slaves is submitted to only in so far as chattel slavery in the old form

could not be kept up. But although the freedman is no longer considered

the property of the individual master, he is considered the slave of

society and all independent State legislation will share the tendency to

make him such.

“The solution of the problem would be very much facilitated by enabling

all the loyal and free labor elements in the South to exercise a healthy

influence upon legislation. It will hardly be possible to secure the

freedman against oppressive class legislation and private persecution

unless he be endowed with a certain measure of political power.”

To the argument of ignorance Schurz replied: “The effect of the extension

of the franchise to the colored people upon the development of free labor

and upon the security of human rights in the South being the principal

object in view, the objections raised on the ground of the ignorance of

the freedmen become unimportant. Practical liberty is a good school....

It is idle to say that it will be time to speak of Negro suffrage when

the whole colored race will be educated, for the ballot may be necessary

to him to secure his education.”[161]

Thus Negro suffrage was forced to the front, not as a method of

humiliating the South; not as a theoretical and dangerous gift to the

Freedmen; not according to any preconcerted plan but simply because of

the grim necessities of the situation. The North must either give up

the fruits of war, keep a Freedmen’s Bureau for a generation or use

the Negro vote to reconstruct the Southern states and to insure such

legislation as would at least begin the economic emancipation of the

slave.

_In other words the North being unable to free the slave, let him try to

free himself. And he did, and this was his greatest gift to this nation._

Let us return to the steps by which the Negro accomplished this task.

In 1866, the joint committee of Congress on Reconstruction said that in

the South: “A large proportion of the population had become, instead

of mere chattels, free men and citizens. Through all the past struggle

these had remained true and loyal and had, in large numbers, fought on

the side of the Union. It was impossible to abandon them without securing

them their rights as free men and citizens. The whole civilized world

would have cried out against such base ingratitude and the bare idea is

offensive to all right thinking men. Hence it became important to inquire

what could be done to secure their rights, civil and political.”

The report then proceeded to emphasize the increased political power of

the South and recommended the Fourteenth Amendment, since: “It appeared

to your committee that the rights of these persons by whom the basis

of representation had been thus increased should be recognized by the

General Government. While slaves, they were not considered as having any

rights, civil or political. It did not seem just or proper that all the

political advantages derived from their becoming free should be confined

to their former masters who had fought against the Union and withheld

from themselves who had always been loyal.”[162]

Nor did there seem to be any hope that the South would voluntarily change

its attitude within any reasonable time. As Carl Schurz wrote: “I deem it

proper, however, to offer a few remarks on the assertion frequently put

forth, that the franchise is likely to be extended to the colored man by

the voluntary action of the southern whites themselves. My observation

leads me to a contrary opinion. Aside from a very few enlightened men,

I found but one class of people in favor of the enfranchisement of the

blacks: it was the class of Unionists who found themselves politically

ostracised and looked upon the enfranchisement of the loyal Negroes as

the salvation of the whole loyal element.... The masses are strongly

opposed to colored suffrage; anybody that dares to advocate it is

stigmatized as a dangerous fanatic.

“The only manner in which, in my opinion, the southern people can be

induced to grant to the freedmen some measure of self-protecting power

in the form of suffrage, is to make it a consideration precedent to

‘readmission’.”[163]

During 1866, the Freedmen’s Bureau received over a million dollars mostly

from the Freedmen’s fund, sales of crop, rent of lands and buildings

and school taxes. The chief expenditure was in wages, rent and schools.

It was evident that the Negro was demanding education. Schools arose

immediately among the refugees and Negro soldiers. They were helped by

voluntary taxation of the Negroes and then by the activity of Northern

religious bodies. Seldom in the history of the world has an almost

totally illiterate population been given the means of self-education in

so short a time. The movement started with the Negroes themselves and

they continued to form the dynamic force behind it. “This great multitude

arose up simultaneously and asked for intelligence.” There can be no

doubt that these schools were a great conservative steadying force to

which the South owes much. It must not be forgotten that among the agents

of the Freedmen’s Bureau were not only soldiers and politicians but

school teachers and educational leaders like Ware and Cravath.

In 1866, nearly 100,000 Negroes were in the schools under 1300 teachers

and schools for Negroes had been opened in nearly all the southern

states. A second Freedmen’s Bureau act was passed extending the work of

the Bureau, and the Freedmen’s Bank which had been started in 1865 and

had by 1866 twenty branches and $300,000 in savings.

Congress came to blows with President Johnson. His plan of reconstruction

with white male suffrage was repudiated and the 14th Amendment was

proposed by Congress which was designed to force the South to accept

Negro suffrage on penalty of losing a proportionate amount of their

representation in Congress. The 14th Amendment was long delayed and did

not in fact become a law until July, 1868. Meantime, Congress adopted

more drastic measures. By the Reconstruction Acts, the first of which

passed March 2nd, the South was divided into five military districts,

Negro suffrage was established for the constitutional conventions and the

14th Amendment made a prerequisite for readmission of states to the Union.

What was the result? No language has been spared to describe the results

of Negro suffrage as the worst imaginable. Every effort of historical

and social science and propaganda have supported this view; and its

acceptance has been well nigh universal, because it was so clearly to the

interests of the chief parties involved to forget their own shortcomings

and put the blame on the Negro. As a colored man put it, they closed

the “bloody chasm” but closed up the Negro inside. Yet, without Negro

suffrage, slavery could not have been abolished in the United States

and while there were bad results arising from the enfranchisement of

the slaves as there necessarily had to be, the main results were not

bad. Let us not forget that the white South believed it to be of vital

interest to its welfare that the experiment of Negro suffrage should

fail ignominiously and that almost to a man the whites were willing to

insure this failure either by active force or passive resistance; that

beside this there were, as might be expected in a day of social upheaval,

men, white and black, Northern and Southern, only too eager to take

advantage of such a situation for feathering their own nests. The results

in such case had to be evil but to charge the evil to Negro suffrage is

unfair. It may be charged to anger, poverty, venality and ignorance, but

the anger and poverty were the almost inevitable aftermath of war; the

venality was much more reprehensible as exhibited among whites than among

Negroes, and while ignorance was the curse of the Negroes, the fault was

not theirs and they took the initiative to correct it.

Negro suffrage was without doubt a tremendous experiment but with all

its manifest failure it succeeded to an astounding degree; it made the

immediate re-establishment of the old slavery impossible and it was

probably the only quick method of doing this; it gave the Freedmen’s sons

a chance to begin their education. It diverted the energy of the white

South from economic development to the recovery of political power and

in this interval—small as it was—the Negro took his first steps toward

economic freedom. It was the greatest and most important step toward

world democracy of all men of all races ever taken in the modern world.

Let us see just what happened when the Negroes gained the right to vote,

first in the conventions which reconstructed the form of government and

afterward in the regular state governments. The continual charge is made

that the South was put under Negro government—that ignorant ex-slaves

ruled the land. This is untrue. Negroes did not dominate southern

legislatures, and in only two states did they have a majority of the

legislature at any time. In Alabama in the years of 1868-69 there were

106 whites and 27 Negroes in the legislature; in the year 1876 there were

104 whites and 29 Negroes. In Arkansas, 1868-69 there were 8 Negroes

and 96 whites. In Georgia there were 186 whites and 33 Negroes. In

Mississippi, 1870-1, there were 106 whites and 34 Negroes and in 1876,

132 whites and 21 Negroes. In North Carolina, 149 whites and 21 Negroes;

in South Carolina 1868-69, 72 whites and 85 Negroes and in 1876, 70

whites and 54 Negroes. In Texas, 1870-71 there were 110 whites and 10

Negroes. In Virginia, 1868-69, 119 whites and 18 Negroes and in 1876, 112

whites and 13 Negroes.[164]

“Statistics show, however, that with the exception of South Carolina and

Mississippi, no state and not even any department of a state government

was ever dominated altogether by Negroes. The Negroes never wanted and

never had complete control in the Southern states. The most important

offices were generally held by white men. Only two Negroes ever served

in the United States Senate, Hiram R. Revells and B. K. Bruce; and only

twenty ever became representatives in the House and all these did not

serve at the same time, although some of them were elected for more than

one term.”[165]

The Negroes who held office, held for the most part minor offices and

most of them were ignorant men. Some of them were venal and vicious but

this was not true in all cases. Indeed the Freedmen were pathetic too in

their attempt to choose the best persons but they were singularly limited

in their choice. Their former white masters were either disfranchised or

bitterly hostile or ready to deceive them. The “carpet-baggers” often

cheated them; their own ranks had few men of experience and training. Yet

some of the colored men who served them well deserve special mention:

Samuel J. Lee, a member of the South Carolina legislature, was considered

by the whites as one of the best criminal lawyers of the state. When

he died local courts were adjourned and the whole city mourned. Bishop

Isaac Clinton who served as Treasurer of Orangeburg, S. C. for eight

years was held in highest esteem by his white neighbors and upon the

occasion of his death business was suspended as a mark of respect. In

certain communities Negroes were retained in office for years after

the restoration of Democratic party control as, for example Mr. George

Harriot in Georgetown, S. C. who was Superintendent of Education for the

county. Beaufort, South Carolina, retained Negroes as sheriffs and school

officials.

J. T. White who was Commissioner of Public Works and Internal

Improvements in Arkansas; M. W. Gibbs who was Municipal Judge in Little

Rock, and J. C. Corbin, who was State Superintendent of Schools in

Arkansas, had creditable records.[166] John R. Lynch, when speaker of

Mississippi House of Representatives, was given a public testimonial by

Republicans and Democrats and the leading Democratic paper said: “His

bearing in office had been so proper and his rulings in such marked

contrast to the partisan conduct of the ignoble whites of his party

who have aspired to be leaders of the blacks, that the conservatives

cheerfully joined in the testimonial.”[167]

Of the colored treasurer of South Carolina, Governor Chamberlain said:

“I have never heard one word or seen one act of Mr. Cardoza’s which did

not confirm my confidence in his personal integrity and his political

honor and zeal for the honest administration of the State Government. On

every occasion and under all circumstances he has been against fraud and

jobbery and in favor of good measures and good men.”[168]

Jonathan C. Gibbs, a colored man and the first State Superintendent of

Instructions in Florida, was a graduate of Dartmouth. He established

the system and brought it to success, dying in harness in 1874. The

first Negro graduate of Harvard College served in South Carolina, before

he became chief executive officer of the association that erected the

Grant’s Tomb in New York.

In Louisiana we may mention Acting-Governor Pinchback, and

Lieutenant-Governor Dunn, and Treasurer Dubuclet who was investigated

by United States officials. E. P. White, afterward Chief Justice of the

United States, reported that his funds had been honestly handled. Such

men—and there were others—ought not to be forgotten or confounded with

other types of colored and white Reconstruction leaders.

Between 1871 and 1901, twenty-two Negroes sat in Congress—two as senators

and twenty as representatives; three or four others were undoubtedly

elected but were not seated. Ten of these twenty-two Negroes were college

bred: Cain of South Carolina was trained at Wilberforce and afterward

became bishop of the African Methodist Church; Revels was educated at

Knox College, Illinois, or at a Quaker Seminary, in Indiana; Cheatham

was a graduate of Shaw; Murray was trained at the University of South

Carolina; Langston was a graduate of Oberlin; five others were lawyers of

whom the most brilliant was Robert Brown Elliott; he was a graduate of

Eton College, England; Rapier was educated in Canada and O’Hara studied

at Howard University; Miller graduated from Lincoln and White from Howard

University. The other twelve men were self-taught: one was a thriving

merchant tailor, one a barber, three were farmers, one a photographer,

one a pilot and one a merchant.[169]

Of those who served in the Senate, one served an unexpired term and the

other six years. In the House, one representative served one term from

Virginia. From North Carolina one served one term and two, two terms.

Georgia was represented by a Negro for one term and Mississippi for two

terms. South Carolina had eight representatives, two of them served five

terms, three two terms, and the rest one term. Beside these there were

other Negro office holders who were fully the peers of white men; and

those without formal training in the schools were in many cases men of

unusual force and native ability.

James G. Blaine who served with nearly all these men approved of sending

them to Congress: “If it is to be viewed simply as an experiment, it was

triumphantly successful. The colored men who took seats in both Senate

and House did not appear ignorant or helpless. They were as a rule

studious, earnest, ambitious men whose public conduct—as illustrated by

Mr. Revels and Mr. Bruce in the Senate and by Mr. Rapier, Mr. Lynch and

Mr. Rainey in the House would be honorable to any race. Coals of fire

were heaped on the heads of all their enemies when the colored men in

Congress heartily joined in removing the disabilities of those who had

before been their oppressors, and who, with deep regret be it said, have

continued to treat them with injustice and ignominy.”[170]

He cites the magnanimity of Senator Rainey: “When the Amnesty Bill

came before the House for consideration, Mr. Rainey of South Carolina,

speaking for the colored race whom he represented said: ‘It is not the

disposition of my constituents that these disabilities should longer

be retained. We are desirous of being magnanimous; it may be that we

are so to a fault. Nevertheless we have open and frank hearts towards

those who were our oppressors and taskmasters. We foster no enmity now,

and we desire to foster none, for their acts in the past to us or to

the Government we love so well. But while we are willing to accord them

their enfranchisement and here today give our votes that they may be

amnestied, while we declare our hearts open and free from any vindictive

feelings toward them, we would say to those gentlemen on the other side

that there is another class of citizens in the country who have certain

rights and immunities which they would like you, sirs, to remember and

respect.... We invoke you gentlemen, to show the same kindly feeling

towards us, a race long oppressed, and in demonstration of this humane

and just feeling, I implore you, give support to the Civil Rights Bill,

which we have been asking at your hands, lo! these many days.”[171]

The chief charge against Negro governments has to do with property. These

governments are charged with attacking property and the charge is true.

This, although not perhaps sensed at the time, was their real reason

for being. The ex-slaves must have land and capital or they would fall

back into slavery. The masters had both; there must be a transfer. It

was at first proposed that land be confiscated in the South and given to

the Freedmen. “Forty Acres and a Mule” was the widespread promise made

several times with official sanction. This was perhaps the least that

the United States Government could have done to insure emancipation, but

such a program would have cost money. In the early anger of the war, it

seemed to many fair to confiscate land for this purpose without payment

and some land was thus sequestered. But manifestly with all the losses

of war and with the loss of the slaves it was unfair to take the land of

the South without some compensation. The North was unwilling to add to

its tremendous debt anything further to insure the economic independence

of the Freedmen. The Freedmen therefore themselves with their political

power and with such economic advantage as the war gave them, tried to get

hold of land.

The Negro party platform of 1876, in one state, advocated “division of

lands of the state as far as practical into small farms in order that

the masses of our people may be enabled to become landholders.” In the

Constitutional Convention of South Carolina, a colored man said: “One

of the greatest of slavery bulwarks was the infernal plantation system,

one man owning his thousand, another his twenty, another fifty thousands

acres of land. This is the only way by which we will break up that

system, and I maintain that our freedom will be of no effect if we allow

it to continue. What is the main cause of the prosperity of the North.

It is because every man has his own farm and is free and independent.

Let the lands of the South be similarly divided. I would not say for one

moment they should be confiscated but if sold to maintain the war, now

that slavery is destroyed, let the plantation system go with it. We

will never have true freedom until we abolish the system of agriculture

which existed in the Southern States. It is useless to have any schools

while we maintain the stronghold of slavery as the agricultural system

of the country.”[172] This question kept coming up in the South Carolina

convention and elsewhere. Such arguments led in South Carolina to a

scheme to buy land and distribute it and some $800,000 was appropriated

for this purpose.

In the second place, property was attacked through the tax system. The

South had been terribly impoverished and was saddled with new social

burdens. Many of the things which had been done well or indifferently by

the plantations—like the punishment of crime and the care of the sick

and the insane, and such schooling as there was, with most other matters

of social uplift were, after the war, transferred to the control of the

state. Moreover the few and comparatively indifferent public buildings

of slavery days had been ruined either by actual warfare or by neglect.

Thus a new and tremendous burden of social taxation was put upon the

reconstructed states.

As a southern writer says of the state of Mississippi: “The work

of restoration which the government was obliged to undertake, made

increased expenses necessary. During the period of the war, and for

several years thereafter, public buildings and state institutions were

permitted to fall into decay. The state house and grounds, the executive

mansion, the penitentiary, the insane asylum, and the buildings for the

blind, deaf and dumb, were in a dilapidated condition and had to be

extended and repaired. A new building for the blind was purchased and

fitted up. The reconstructionists established a public school system

and spent money to maintain and support it, perhaps too freely, in view

of the impoverishment of the people. When they took hold, warrants

were worth but sixty or seventy cents on the dollar, a fact which

made the price of building materials used in the work of construction

correspondingly higher.”[173]

In addition to all this there was fraud and stealing. There were white

men who cheated and secured large sums. Most of $800,000 appropriated for

land in South Carolina was wasted in graft. Bills for wine and furniture

in South Carolina were enormous; the printing bill of Mississippi was

ridiculously extravagant. Colored men shared in this loot but they at

least had some excuse. We may not forget that among slaves stealing

is not the crime that it becomes in free industry. The slave is victim

of a theft so hateful that nothing he can steal can ever match it. The

freedmen of 1868 still shared the slave psychology. The larger part of

the stealing was done by white men—Northerners and Southerners—and we

must remember that it was not the first time that there had been stealing

and corruption in the South and that the whole moral tone of the nation

had been ruined by war. For instance:

In 1839 it was reported in Mississippi that ninety per cent of the

fines collected by sheriffs and clerks were unaccounted for. In 1841

the State Treasurer acknowledged himself “at a loss to determine the

precise liabilities of the state and her means of paying the same.” And

in 1839 the auditor’s books had not been posted for eighteen months,

no entries made for a year, and no vouchers examined for three years.

Congress gave Jefferson College, Natchez, more than 46,000 acres of land;

before the war this whole property had “disappeared” and the college

was closed. Congress gave to Mississippi among other states, the “16th

section” of the public lands for schools. In thirty years the proceeds

of this land in Mississippi were embezzled to the amount of at least one

and a half millions of dollars. In Columbus, Mississippi a receiver of

public monies stole $100,000 and resigned. His successor stole $55,000

and a treasury agent wrote: “Another receiver would probably follow in

the footsteps of the two. You will not be surprised if I recommend him

being retained in preference to another appointment.” From 1830 to 1860

southern men in federal offices alone embezzled more than a million

dollars—a far greater sum then than now.

There might have been less stealing in the South during Reconstruction

without Negro suffrage but it is certainly highly instructive to remember

that the mark of the thief which dragged its slime across nearly every

great Northern State and almost up to the presidential chair could not

certainly in those cases be charged against the vote of black men. This

was the day when a national Secretary of War was caught stealing, a vice

president presumably took bribes, a private secretary of the president,

a chief clerk of the Treasury, and eighty-six government officials stole

millions in the Whiskey frauds; while the “Credit Mobilier” filched

millions and bribed the government to an extent never fully revealed; not

to mention less distinguished thieves like Tweed.

Is it surprising that in such an atmosphere a new race learning the a-b-c

of government should have become the tools of thieves? And when they

did, was the stealing their fault or was it justly chargeable to their

enfranchisement? Then too, a careful examination of the alleged stealing

in the South reveals much: First, there is repeated exaggeration. For

instance, it is said that the taxation in Mississippi was fourteen times

as great in 1874 as in 1869. This sounds staggering until we learn that

the State taxation in 1869 was only ten cents on one hundred dollars

and that the expenses of government in 1874 were only twice as great as

in 1860 and that too with a depreciated currency. It could certainly

be argued that the State government in Mississippi was doing enough

additional work in 1874 to warrant greatly increased cost. The character

of much of the stealing shows who were the thieves. The frauds through

the manipulation of State and railway bonds and of bank notes must have

inured chiefly to the benefit of experienced white men and this must

have been largely the case in the furnishing and printing frauds. It was

chiefly in the extravagance for “sundries and incidentals” and direct

money payments for votes that the Negroes received their share. The

character of the real thieving shows that white men must have been the

chief beneficiaries and that as a former South Carolina slaveholder said:

“The legislature, ignorant as it is, could not have been bribed without

money; that must have been furnished from some source that it is our

duty to discover. A legislature composed chiefly of our former slaves

has been bribed. One prominent feature of this transaction is the part

which native Carolinians have played in it, some of our own household men

whom the State, in the past, has delighted to honor, appealing to their

cupidity and avarice make them the instruments to effect the robbery of

their impoverished white brethren. Our former slaves have been bribed by

these men to give them the privilege by law of plundering the property

holders of the state.”[174]

Even those who mocked and sneered at Negro legislators brought now and

then words of praise: “But beneath all this shocking burlesque upon

Legislative proceedings we must not forget that there is something very

real to this uncouth and untutored multitude. It is not all shame, not

all burlesque. They have a genuine interest and a genuine earnestness

in the business of the assembly which we are bound to recognize and

respect.... They have an earnest purpose, born of conviction that their

conditions are not fully assured, which lends a sort of dignity to their

proceedings. The barbarous, animated jargon in which they so often

indulge is on occasion seen to be so transparently sincere and weighty

in their own minds that sympathy supplants disgust. The whole thing is

a wonderful novelty to them as well as to observers. Seven years ago

these men were raising corn and cotton under the whip of the overseer.

Today they are raising points of order and questions of privilege. They

find they can raise one as well as the other. They prefer the latter. It

is easier and better paid. Then, it is the evidence of an accomplished

result. It means escape and defence from old oppressors. It means

liberty. It means the destruction of prison walls only too real to them.

It is the sunshine of their lives. It is their day of jubilee. It is

their long promised vision of the Lord God Almighty.”[175]

But with the memory of the Freedmen’s Bank before it, America should

utter no sound as to Negro dishonesty during reconstruction. Here from

the entrenched philanthropy of America with some of the greatest names

of the day like Peter Cooper, William Cullen Bryant, Simon P. Chase, A.

A. Low, Gerritt Smith, John Jay, A. S. Barnes, S. G. Howe, George L.

Stearns, Edward Atkinson, Levi Coffin and others, a splendid scheme was

launched to help the Freedmen save their pittance and encourage thrift

and hope. On the covers of the pass books is said: “This is a benevolent

institution and profits go to the depositors or to educational purposes

for the Freedmen and their descendants. The whole institution is under

the charter of Congress and receives the commendation of the President,

Abraham Lincoln.” With blare of trumpet it was chartered March 3rd, 1865;

it collapsed in hopeless bankruptcy in 1873. It had received fifty-six

millions of dollars in deposits and failed owing over three millions

most of which was never repaid. A committee of Congress composed of both

Democrats and Republicans said in 1876:

“The law lent no efficacy to the moral obligations assumed by the

trustees, officers, and agents and the whole concern inevitably became

as a ‘whited sepulchre’.... The inspectors ... were of little or no

value, either through the connivance and ignorance of the inspectors or

the indifference of the trustees to their reports.... The committee of

examination ... were still more careless and inefficient, while the board

of trustees, as a supervising and administrative body, intrusted with

the fullest power of general control over the management, proved utterly

faithless to the trust reposed in them....

“The depositors were of small account now compared with the personal

interest of the political jobbers, real estate pools, and fancy-stock

speculators, who were organizing a raid upon the Freedmen’s money

and resorted to ... amendment of the charter to facilitate their

operations.... This mass of putridity, the District government, now

abhorred of all men, and abandoned and repudiated even by the political

authors of its being, was represented in the bank by no less than five

of its high officers ... all of whom were in one way or other concerned

in speculations involving a free use of the funds of the Freedmen’s

Bank. They were high in power, too, with the dominant influence in

Congress, as the legislation they asked or sanctioned and obtained, fully

demonstrated. Thus it was that without consulting the wishes or regarding

the interests of those most concerned—the depositors—the vaults of the

bank were literally thrown open to unscrupulous greed and rapacity.

The toilsome savings of the poor Negroes hoarded and laid by for a

rainy day, through the carelessness and dishonest connivance of their

self-constituted guardians, melted away....”[176]

Even in bankruptcy the institution was not allowed to come under the

operation of the ordinary laws but was liquidated and protected by a

special law, the liquidators picking its corpse and the helpless victims

being finally robbed not only of their money but of much of their faith

in white folk.

Let us laugh hilariously if we must over the golden spittoons of South

Carolina but let us also remember that at most the freedmen filched bits

from those who had all and not all from those who had nothing; and that

the black man had at least the saving grace to hide his petty theft by

enshrining the nasty American habit of spitting in the sheen of sunshine.

With all these difficulties and failings, what did the Freedmen in

politics during the critical years of their first investment with the

suffrage accomplish? We may recognize three things which Negro rule gave

to the South:

1. Democratic government.

2. Free public schools.

3. New social legislation.

Two states will illustrate conditions of government in the South before

and after Negro rule. In South Carolina there was before the war a

property qualification for office holders, and in part, for voters.

The Constitution of 1868, on the other hand, was a modern democratic

document starting (in marked contrast to the old constitution) with a

declaration that “We, the People,”[177] framed it and preceded by a

broad Declaration of Rights which did away with property qualifications

and based representation directly on population instead of property.

It especially took up new subjects of social legislation, declaring

navigable rivers free public highways, instituting homestead exemptions,

establishing boards of county commissioners, providing for a new

penal code of laws, establishing universal manhood suffrage “without

distinction of race or color,” devoting six sections to charitable and

penal institutions and six to corporations, providing separate property

for married women, etc. Above all, eleven sections of the Tenth Article

were devoted to the establishment of a complete public school system.

So satisfactory was the constitution thus adopted by Negro suffrage

and by a convention composed of a majority of blacks that the States

lived twenty-seven years under it without essential change and when the

constitution was revised in 1895, the revision was practically nothing

more than an amplification of the Constitution of 1868. No essential

advance step of the former document was changed except the suffrage

article to disfranchise Negroes.

In Mississippi the Constitution of 1868 was, as compared with that before

the war, more democratic. It not only forbade distinctions on account

of color but abolished all property qualifications for jury service and

property and educational qualifications for suffrage; it required less

rigorous qualifications for office; it prohibited the lending of the

credit of the State for private corporations—an abuse dating back as far

as 1830. It increased the powers of the governor, raised the low State

salaries, and increased the number of state officials. New ideas like

the public school system and the immigration bureau were introduced and

in general the activity of the State greatly and necessarily enlarged.

Finally that was the only constitution of the State ever submitted to

popular approval at the polls. This constitution remained in force

twenty-two years.

In general the words of Judge Albion W. Tourgee, “a carpet-bagger,” are

true when he says of the Negro governments: “They obeyed the Constitution

of the United States and annulled the bonds of states, counties and

cities which had been issued to carry on the war of rebellion and

maintain armies in the field against the Union. They instituted a public

school system in a realm where public schools had been unknown. They

opened the ballot box and jury box to thousands of white men who had

been debarred from them by a lack of earthly possessions. They introduced

home rule in the South. They abolished the whipping post, the branding

iron, the stocks and other barbarous forms of punishment which had up to

that time prevailed. They reduced capital felonies from about twenty to

two or three. In an age of extravagance they were extravagant in the sums

appropriated for public works. In all of that time no man’s rights of

person were invaded under the forms of law. Every Democrat’s life, home,

fireside and business were safe. No man obstructed any white man’s way to

the ballot box, interfered with his freedom of speech or boycotted him,

on account of his political faith.”[178]

A thorough study of the legislation accompanying these constitutions and

its changes since would, of course, be necessary before a full picture

of the situation could be given. This has not been done but so far as my

studies have gone I have been surprised at the comparatively small amount

of change in law and government which the overthrow of Negro rule brought

about. There were sharp and often hurtful economies introduced, marking

the return of property to power, there was a sweeping change in officials

but the main body of Reconstruction legislation stood.

There is no doubt but that the thirst of the black man for knowledge—a

thirst which has been too persistent and durable to be mere curiosity

or whim—gave birth to the public free school system of the South. It

was the question upon which the black voters and legislators insisted

more than anything else and while it is possible to find some vestiges

of free schools in some of the Southern States before the war yet a

universal, well established system dates from the day that the black

man got political power. Common school instruction in the South, in the

modern sense of the term, was begun for Negroes by the Freedmen’s Bureau

and missionary societies, and the State public school systems for all

children were formed mainly by Negro Reconstruction governments.

The earlier state constitutions of Mississippi “from 1817 to 1864

contained a declaration that ‘Religion, morality and knowledge being

necessary to good government, the preservation of liberty and the

happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever

be encouraged.’ It was not, however, until 1868 that encouragement

was given to any general system of public schools meant to embrace

the whole youthful population.” The Constitution of 1868 makes it the

duty of the legislature to establish “a uniform system of free public

schools by taxation or otherwise for all children between the ages of

five and twenty-one years.” In Alabama the Reconstruction Constitution

of 1868 provided that “It shall be the duty of the Board of Education

to establish throughout the State in each township or other school

district which it may have created, one or more schools at which all

children of the state between the ages of five and twenty-one years may

attend free of charge.” Arkansas in 1868, Florida in 1869, Virginia

in 1870, established school systems. The Constitution of 1868 in

Louisiana required the general assembly to establish “at least one free

public school in every parish,” and that these schools should make no

“distinction of race, color or previous condition.” Georgia’s system was

not fully established until 1873.

We are apt to forget that in all human probability the granting of Negro

manhood suffrage was decisive in rendering permanent the foundation

of the Negro common school. Even after the overthrow of the Negro

governments, if the Negroes had been left a servile caste, personally

free but politically powerless, it is not reasonable to think that

a system of common schools would have been provided for them by the

Southern states. Serfdom and education have ever proven contradictory

terms. But when Congress, backed by the nation, determined to make the

Negroes full-fledged voting citizens, the South had a hard dilemma before

her; either to keep the Negroes under as an ignorant proletariat and

stand the chance of being ruled eventually from the slums and jails, or

to join in helping to raise these wards of the nation to a position of

intelligence and thrift by means of a public school system.[179]

The “carpet-bag” governments hastened the decision of the South and

although there was a period of hesitation and retrogression after the

overthrow of Negro rule in the early seventies, yet the South saw that

to abolish Negro schools in addition to nullifying the Negro vote would

invite Northern interference; and thus eventually every Southern state

confirmed the work of the Negro legislators and maintained the Negro

public schools along with the white.

Finally, in legislation covering property the wider functions of the

State, the punishment of crime and the like, it is sufficient to say that

the laws on these points established by Reconstruction legislatures were

not only different and even revolutionary to the laws of the older South,

but they were so wise and so well suited to the needs of the new South

that in spite of a retrogressive movement following the overthrow of the

Negro governments, the mass of this legislation with elaboration and

development still stands on the statute books of the South.

Reconstruction constitutions, practically unaltered, were kept in

Florida, 1868-1885 17 years

Virginia, 1870-1902 32 years

South Carolina, 1868-1895 27 years

Mississippi, 1868-1890 22 years

Even in the case of states like Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina and

Louisiana, which adopted new constitutions to signify the overthrow

of Negro rule, the new constitutions are nearer the model of the

Reconstruction document than they are to the previous constitutions. They

differ from the Negro constitutions in minor details but very little in

general conception.

Here then on the whole was a much more favorable result of a great

experiment in democracy than the world had a right to await. But

even on its more sinister side and in the matter of the ignorance of

inexperience and venality of the colored voters there came signs of

better things. The theory of democratic government is not that the will

of the people is always right, but rather that normal human beings of

average intelligence will, if given a chance, learn the right and best

course by bitter experience. This is precisely what the Negro voters

showed indubitable signs of doing. First, they strove for schools to

abolish their ignorance, and second, a large and growing number of them

revolted against the carnival of extravagance and stealing that marred

the beginning of Reconstruction and joined with the best elements to

institute reform; and the greatest stigma on the white South is not

that it opposed Negro suffrage and resented theft and incompetence, but

that when it saw the reform movement growing and even in some cases

triumphing, and a larger and larger number of black voters learning to

vote for honesty and ability, it still preferred a Reign of Terror to

a campaign of education and disfranchised Negroes instead of punishing

rascals.

No one has expressed this more convincingly than a Negro who was himself

a member of the Reconstruction legislature of South Carolina and who

spoke at the convention which disfranchised him, against one of the

onslaughts of Tillman:

“The gentleman from Edgefield (Mr. Tillman) speaks of the piling up of

the State debt; of jobbery and speculation during the period between

1869 and 1873 in South Carolina, but he has not found voice eloquent

enough nor pen exact enough to mention those imperishable gifts bestowed

upon South Carolina between 1873 and 1876 by Negro legislators—the laws

relative to finance, the building of penal and charitable institutions

and, greatest of all, the establishment of the public school system.

Starting as infants in legislation in 1869, many wise measures were not

thought of, many injudicious acts were passed. But in the administration

of affairs for the next four years, having learned by experience the

result of bad acts, we immediately passed reformatory laws touching

every department of state, county, municipal and town governments. These

enactments are today upon the statute books of South Carolina. They stand

as living witnesses of the Negro’s fitness to vote and legislate upon the

rights of mankind.

“When we came into power, town governments could lend the credit of

their respective towns to secure funds at any rate of interest that the

council saw fit to pay. Some of the towns paid as high as twenty percent.

We passed an act prohibiting town governments from pledging the credit

of their hamlets for money bearing a greater rate of interest than five

percent.

“Up to 1874, inclusive, the State Treasurer had the power to pay out

State funds as he pleased. He could elect whether he would pay out the

funds on appropriations that would place the money in the hands of the

speculators, or would apply them to appropriations that were honest and

necessary. We saw the evil of this and passed an act making specific

levies and collections of taxes for specific appropriations.

“Another source of profligacy in the expenditure of funds was the law

that provided for and empowered the levying and collecting of special

taxes by school districts, in the name of the schools. We saw its evil

and by a Constitutional amendment provided that there should only be

levied and collected annually a tax of two mills for school purposes,

and took away from the school districts the power to levy and to collect

taxes of any kind. By this act we cured the evils that had been inflicted

upon us in the name of the schools, settled the public school question

for all time to come and established the system upon an honest financial

basis.

“Next, we learned during the period from 1869 to 1874 inclusive, that

what was denominated the floating indebtedness, covering the printing

schemes and other indefinite expenditures, amounted to nearly $2,000,000.

A conference was called of the leading Negro representatives in the

two Houses together with the State Treasurer, also a Negro. After this

conference we passed an act for the purpose of ascertaining the bona fide

floating debt and found that it did not amount to more than $250,000 for

the four years; we created a commission to sift that indebtedness and to

scale it. Hence when the Democratic party came into power they found the

floating debt covering the legislative and all other expenditures, fixed

at the certain sum of $250,000. This same class of Negro legislators,

led by the State Treasurer, Mr. F. L. Cardoza, knowing that there were

millions of fraudulent bonds charged against the credit of the State,

passed another act to ascertain the true bonded indebtedness and to

provide for its settlement. Under this law, at one sweep, those entrusted

with the power to do so, through Negro legislators, stamped six millions

of bonds, denominated as conversion bonds, ‘fraudulent.’ The commission

did not finish its work before 1876. In that year when the Hampton

government came into power, there were still to be examined into and

settled under the terms of the act passed by us and providing for the

legitimate bonded indebtedness of the State, a little over two and a half

million dollars worth of bonds and coupons which had not been passed upon.

“Governor Hampton, General Hagood, Judge Simonton, Judge Wallace and

in fact, all of the conservative thinking Democrats aligned themselves

under the provision enacted by us for the certain and final settlement

of the bonded indebtedness and appealed to their Democratic legislators

to stand by the Republican legislation on the subject and to confirm it.

A faction in the Democratic party obtained a majority of the Democrats

in the legislature against settling the question and they endeavored to

open up anew the whole subject of the State debt. We had a little over

thirty members in the House and enough Republican senators to sustain the

Hampton conservative faction and to stand up for honest finance, or by

our votes to place the debt question of the old State into the hands of

the plunderers and speculators. We were appealed to by General Hagood,

through me, and my answer to him was in these words: ‘General, our people

have learned the difference between profligate and honest legislation.

We have passed acts of financial reform, and with the assistance of God,

when the vote shall have been taken, you will be able to record for the

thirty-odd Negroes, slandered though they have been through the press,

that they voted solidly with you all for the honest legislation and the

preservation of the credit of the State.’ The thirty-odd Negroes in

the legislature and their senators by their votes did settle the debt

question and saved the State $13,000,000.

“We were eight years in power. We had built school houses, established

charitable institutions, built and maintained the penitentiary system,

provided for the education of the deaf and dumb, rebuilt the jails

and court houses, rebuilt the bridges and re-established the ferries.

In short, we had reconstructed the State and placed it upon the road

to prosperity and, at the same time, by our acts of financial reform,

transmitted to the Hampton government an indebtedness not greater by more

than $2,500,000 than was the bonded debt of the State in 1868, before the

Republican Negroes and their white allies came into power.”[180]

So too in Louisiana in 1872 and in Mississippi later the better element

of the Republicans triumphed at the polls and joining with the Democrats

instituted reforms, repudiated the worst extravagances and started toward

better things. But unfortunately there was one thing that the white South

feared more than Negro dishonesty, ignorance and incompetency, and that

was Negro honesty, knowledge and efficiency.

Paint the “carpet-bag” governments and Negro rule as black as may be, the

fact remains that the essence of the revolution which the overturning

of the Negro governments made was to put these black men and their

friends out of power. Outside the curtailing of expenses and stopping

of extravagance, not only did their successors make few changes in the

work which these legislatures and conventions had done, but they largely

carried out their plans, followed their suggestions and strengthened

their institutions. Practically the whole new growth of the South has

been accomplished under laws which black men helped to frame thirty years

ago. I know of no greater compliment to Negro suffrage, and no greater

contribution to real American democracy.[181]

The counter revolution came but it was too late. The Negro had stepped

so far into new economic freedom that he could never be put back into

slavery; and he had widened democracy to include not only a goodly and

increasing number of his own group but the mass of the poor white South.

The economic results of Negro suffrage were so great during the years

from 1865 to 1876 that they have never been overthrown. The Freedmen’s

Bureau came virtually to an end in 1869. General Howard’s report of

that year said: “In spite of all disorders that have prevailed and the

misfortunes that have fallen upon many parts of the South, a good degree

of prosperity and success has already been attained. To the oft-repeated

slander that the Negroes will not work and are incapable of taking care

of themselves, it is a sufficient answer that their voluntary labor has

produced nearly all the food that supported the whole people, besides

a large amount of rice, sugar and tobacco for export, and two millions

of bales of cotton each year, on which was paid into the United States

Treasury during the years 1866 to 1867 a tax of more than forty millions

of dollars ($40,000,000). It is not claimed that this result was wholly

due to the care and oversight of this Bureau but it is safe to say as it

has been said repeatedly by intelligent Southern white men, that without

the Bureau or some similar agency, the material interests of the country

would have greatly suffered and the government would have lost a far

greater amount than has been expended in its maintenance....

“Of the nearly eight hundred thousand (800,000) acres of farming land

and about five thousand (5,000) pieces of town property transferred to

this Bureau by military and treasury officers, or taken up by assistant

commissioners, enough was leased to produce a revenue of nearly four

hundred thousand dollars ($400,000). Some farms were set apart in

each state as homes for the destitute and helpless and a portion was

cultivated by freedmen prior to its restoration....

“Notice the appropriations by Congress:

For the year ending July 1st, 1867 $6,940,450.00

For the year ending July 1st, 1868 3,936,300.00

For the relief of the destitute citizens in

District of Columbia 40,000.00

For relief of destitute freedmen in the same 15,000.00

For expenses of paying bounties in 1869 214,000.00

For expenses for famine in Southern states and

transportation 1,865,645.00

For support of hospitals 50,000.00

Making a total received from all sources of $12,961,395.00

“Our expenditures from the beginning (including assumed accounts of the

‘Department of Negro Affairs’ from January 1st, 1865, to August 31,

1869) have been eleven million two hundred and forty-nine thousand and

twenty-eight dollars and ten cents ($11,249,028.10). In addition to

this cash expenditure the subsistence, medical supplies, quartermasters

stores, issued to the refugees and freedmen prior to July 1st, 1866, were

furnished by the commissary, medical and quartermasters department, and

accounted for in the current expenses of those departments; they were

not charged to nor paid for by my officers. They amounted to two million

three hundred and thirty thousand seven hundred and eighty-eight dollars

and seventy-two cents ($2,330,788.72) in original cost; but a large

portion of these stores being damaged and condemned as unfit for issue

to troops, their real value to the Government was probably less than one

million dollars ($1,000,000). Adding their original cost to the amount

expended from appropriations and other sources, the total expenses of

our Government for refugees and freedmen to August 31, 1869, have been

thirteen million five hundred and seventy-nine thousand eight hundred

and sixteen dollars and eighty-two cents ($13,579,816.82). And deducting

fifty thousand dollars ($50,000) set apart as a special relief fund for

all classes of destitute people in the Southern states, the real cost

has been thirteen million twenty-nine thousand eight hundred and sixteen

dollars and eighty-two cents ($13,029,816.82).”[182]

By 1875, Negroes owned not less than 2,000,000 and perhaps as much as

4,000,000 acres of land and by 1880 this had increased to 6,000,000.

Notwithstanding the great step forward that the Negro had made this

sinister fact faced him and his friends: he formed a minority of the

population of the South. If that population was solidly arrayed against

him his legal status was in danger and his economic progress was going

to be difficult. It has been repeatedly charged that the action of the

Negro solidified Southern opposition; and that the Negro refusing to

listen to and make fair terms with his white neighbors, sought solely

Northern alliance and the protection of Northern bayonets. This is not

true and is turning facts hindside before. The ones who did the choosing

were the Southern master class. When they got practically their full

political rights in 1872 they had a chance to choose, if they would, the

best of the Negroes as their allies and to work with them as against the

most ruthless elements of the white South. Gradually there could have

been built up a political party or even parties of the best of the black

and white South. The Negroes would have been more than modest in their

demands so long as they saw a chance to keep moving toward real freedom.

But the master class did not choose this, although some like Wade Hampton

of South Carolina, made steps toward it. On the whole, the masters

settled definitely upon a purely racial line, recognizing as theirs

everything that had a white skin and putting without the pale of sympathy

and alliance, everything of Negro descent. By bitter and unyielding

social pressure they pounded the whites into a solid phalanx, but in

order to do this they had to give up much.

In the first place the leadership of the South passed from the hands of

the old slave owners into the hands of the newer town capitalists who

were largely merchants and the coming industrial leaders. Some of them

represented the older dominant class and some of them the newer poor

whites. They were welded, however, into a new economic mastership, less

cultivated, more ruthless and more keen in recognizing the possibilities

of Negro labor if “controlled” as they proposed to control it. This new

leadership, however, did not simply solidify the South, it proceeded to

make alliance in the North and to make alliance of the most effective

kind, namely economic alliance. The sentimentalism of the war period had

in the North changed to the recognition of the grim fact of destroyed

capital, dead workers and high prices. The South was a field which could

be exploited if peaceful conditions could be reached and the laboring

class made sufficiently content and submissive. It was the business then

of the “New” South to show to the northern capitalists that by uniting

the economic interests of both, they could exploit the Negro laborer and

the white laborer—pitting the two classes against each other, keeping

out labor unions and building a new industrial South which would pay

tremendous returns. This was the program which began with the withdrawal

of Northern troops in 1876 and was carried on up to 1890 when it gained

political sanction by open laws disfranchising the Negro.

But the experiment was carried on at a terrific cost. First, the Negro

could not be cowed and beaten back from his new-found freedom without a

mass of force, fraud and actual savagery such as strained the moral fibre

of the white South to the utmost. It will be a century before the South

recovers from this _débacle_ and this explains why this great stretch of

land has today so meager an output of science, literature and art and can

discuss practically nothing but the “Negro” problem. It explains why the

South is the one region in the civilized world where sometimes men are

publicly burned alive at the stake.

On the other hand, even this display of force and hatred did not keep

the Negro from advancing and the reason for this was that he was in

competition with a white laboring class which, despite all efforts and

advantages could not outstrip the Negroes and put them wholly under

their feet. By judiciously using this rivalry, the Negro gained economic

advantage after advantage, and foothold after foothold until today

while by no means free and still largely deprived of political rights,

we have a mass of 10,000,000 people whose economic condition may be

thus described: If we roughly conceive of something like a tenth of the

white population as below the line of decent free economic existence, we

may guess that a third of the black American population of 12 millions

is still in economic serfdom, comparable to condition of the submerged

tenth in cities, and held in debt and crime peonage in the sugar, rice

and cotton belts. Six other millions are emerging and fighting, in

competition with white laborers, a fairly successful battle for rising

wages and better conditions. In the last ten years a million of these

have been willing and able to move physically from Southern serfdom to

the freer air of the North.

The other three millions are as free as the better class of white

laborers; and are pushing and carrying the white laborer with them in

their grim determination to hold advantages gained and gain others.

The Negro’s agitation for the right to vote has made any step toward

disfranchising the poor white unthinkable, for the white vote is needed

to help disfranchise the blacks; the black man is pounding open the doors

of exclusive trade guilds; for how can unions exclude whites when Negro

competition can break a steel strike? The Negro is making America and

the world acknowledge democracy as feasible and desirable for all white

folk, for only in this way do they see any possibility of defending their

world wide fear of yellow, brown and black folk.

In a peculiar way, then, the Negro in the United States has emancipated

democracy, reconstructed the threatened edifice of Freedom and been a

sort of eternal test of the sincerity of our democratic ideals. As a

Negro minister, J. W. C. Pennington, said in London and Glasgow before

the Civil war: “The colored population of the United States has no

destiny separate from that of the nation in which they form an integral

part. Our destiny is bound up with that of America. Her ship is ours; her

pilot is ours; her storms are ours; her calms are ours. If she breaks

upon a rock, we break with her. If we, born in America, cannot live upon

the same soil upon terms of equality with the descendants of Scotchmen,

Englishmen, Irishmen, Frenchmen, Germans, Hungarians, Greeks and Poles,

then the fundamental theory of America fails and falls to the ground.”

This is still true and it puts the American Negro in a peculiar strategic

position with regard to the race problems of the whole world. What do

we mean by democracy? Do we mean democracy of the white races and the

subjection of the colored races? Or do we mean the gradual working

forward to a time when all men will have a voice in government and

industry and will be intelligent enough to express the voice?

It is this latter thesis for which the American Negro stands and has

stood, and more than any other element in the modern world it has slowly

but continuously forced America toward that point and is still forcing.

It must be remembered that it was the late Booker T. Washington who

planned the beginning of an industrial democracy in the South, based

on education, and that in our day the National Association for the

Advancement of Colored People, nine-tenths of whose members are Negroes,

is the one persistent agency in the United States which is voicing a

demand for democracy unlimited by race, sex or religion. American Negroes

have even crossed the waters and held three Pan-African Congresses

to arouse black men through the world to work for modern democratic

development. Thus the emancipation of the Negro slave in America becomes

through his own determined effort simply one step toward the emancipation

of all men.