General Aspects of the South at the Close of the War.
The months of May and June were the chaotic period of the returning
Rebel States. All men were overwhelmed and prostrated under the sudden
stroke of a calamity which the fewest number had anticipated. Many had
believed the war hopeless, but nearly all had thought their armies
strong enough, and their statesmen skillful enough, to extort from the
North terms that would soften away, if not conceal, the rugged features
of utter defeat. They expected the necessity of a return to the Union,
but they hoped to march back with flying colors, with concessions
granted and inducements offered that would give them the semblance of a
victory. Studious encouragement had been given from the Rebel Capital to
such hopes; and outside of Virginia there were scarcely a dozen men in a
State who comprehended the straits to which the Confederacy was reduced
in the winter of 1864–65, or were prepared for the instantaneous
collapse of the spring.
The first feelings were those of baffled rage. Men who had fought four
years for an idea, smarted with actual anguish under the stroke which
showed their utter failure. Then followed a sense of bewilderment and
helplessness. Where they were, what rights they had left, what position
they occupied before the law, what claim they had to their property,
what hope they had for an improvement of their condition in the
future—all these were subjects of complete uncertainty.
* * * * *
Here was the opportunity for a statesman to grasp. I speak advisedly,
and after a careful review of our whole experiences through the months
of May and June, in all the leading centers of Southern influence, when
I say that the National Government could at that time have prescribed no
conditions for the return of the Rebel States which they would not have
promptly accepted. They expected nothing; were prepared for the worst;
would have been thankful for anything.
In North and South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, we found this state
of feeling universally prevalent. The people wanted civil government and
a settlement. They asked no terms, made no conditions. They were
defeated and helpless—they submitted. Would the victors be pleased to
tell them what was to be done? Point out any way for a return to an
established order of things, and they would walk in it. They made no
hypocritical professions of new-born Unionism. They had honestly
believed in the right of secession. The hatred of Yankees, which had
originally aided the conspirators in starting the movement, had grown
and strengthened with the war. Neither the constitutional theory nor the
personal hate of their lives could be changed in a day, but both were
alike impotent; and having been forced to abandon the war, they longed
for the blessings which any peace on any terms might be expected to
bring in its train. With unchanged faith in the constitutionality of
their secession, they were ready to abandon or ignore it, at the
requirement of the victors. Fully believing the debts of their Rebel
Government legal and just, they were prepared to repudiate them at a
hint from Washington. Filled with the hatred to the negroes, nearly
always inspired in any ruling class by the loss of accustomed power over
inferiors, they nevertheless yielded to the Freedmen’s Bureau, and
acquiesced in the necessity for according civil rights to their slaves.
They were stung by the disgrace of being guarded by negro soldiers; but
they made no complaints, for they felt that they had forfeited their
right of complaint. They were shocked at the suggestion of negro
suffrage; but if the Government required it, they were ready to submit.
The whole body politic was as wax. It needed but a firm hand to apply
the seal. Whatever device were chosen, the community would at once be
molded to its impress. But if the plastic moment were suffered to
pass——!
* * * * *
So we found public feeling everywhere along the Atlantic coast. So, by
the common testimony of all, it was found throughout the limits of the
rebellion, down to the period when the terms of the President’s North
Carolina proclamation came to be generally understood. On the Gulf we
caught the first responsive notes given to that proclamation by the
revived Southern temper. By the time we reached New Orleans the change
was complete; the reaction had set in. Men now began to talk of their
rights, and to argue constitutional points; as if traitors had rights,
or treason were entitled to constitutional protection. They had
discovered that, having laid down their arms, they were no longer
Rebels, and could no longer be punished; as the thief who is forced to
abandon his booty is no longer a thief, and may laugh at penitentiaries.
As Mr. Randall Hunt dextrously put it, “We withdrew our Representatives
from Congress, and tried to go out of the Union. You went to war to keep
us in. You have conquered; we submit, and send back our Representatives.
What more do you want?” The President had lustily proclaimed treason a
crime, but the Southern people took his actions in preference to his
words, and were confirmed in their own view that it was but a difference
of opinion on a constitutional point, in which, under the circumstances,
they were ready to yield.
Not less marked was the reaction on all points connected with the negro.
He was saucy and rude; disposed to acts of violence; likely, by his
stupid presumptions, to provoke a war of races, which could only end in
his extermination. In all this the Freedmen’s Bureau encouraged him, and
thus became solely a fomenter of mischief. The presence of negro troops
tended to demoralize the whole negro population. Negro evidence would
make courts of justice a mockery. As to negro suffrage, none but the
black-hearted Abolitionists who had brought on this war, and were now
doing their best to provoke a second, would dream of seriously asking
the South to submit to so revolting a humiliation.
The mistake of the last four or five years had been the one against
which Henry A. Wise had warned them in the beginning. They ought to have
fought for their rights within the Union. That they must do now.
* * * * *
Throughout the war, the North believed in the existence of a strong
Union party at the South. Under the peculiar circumstances of our trip,
it would seem natural that, if there was such a party, we should have
found traces of it. Individual Unionists there were, of course; noble
men, who braved every threat, and stood faithful to the last. But,
speaking of a Union party only as comprising numbers of men sufficient
to form an appreciable element in political or social movements, I was
ready, on our return, to affirm that, save in East Tennessee and small
portions of North Carolina, there was no such party in the South. In
many of the States the opponents of secession had been in a majority in
1860. But the movement once started, blood once drawn, the honor of the
States once involved, secession swept everything before it. The
avalanche begins in a little snow-bank. Once set in motion, whatever
stands in the way serves only to swell its bulk and augment its power.
Men who had voted against secession at the risk of their lives, again
and again told me that they were soon forced to go with the current. The
son of one had volunteered, “and, of course, sir, my prayers and hopes
went with my boy and the cause in which he was engaged.” The property of
another was in danger, and to save it he volunteered. At Bull Run his
bosom friend fell by a Yankee ball; from that moment he “was a Rebel,
heart and soul.” “My family, friends, neighbors, old political leaders,
all went with the State,” said another. “I knew it was madness, but I
could not desert them, and I would not be a tory.”
Men like Governor Brown and Alex. H. Stephens were thought at the North
to be leaders of a Union party. Whatever their private views, neither
they nor any other prominent men dared permit themselves to be regarded
in that light at home. “They were opponents of the Administration, not
of the war,” as a Georgian very earnestly explained. “They opposed Mr.
Davis, not because he made war at all, but because he did it with less
vigor and skill than they demanded.”
The belief was prevalent at the North, that, when secession failed, the
decimated and beggared people would turn in bitter rage upon the leaders
who had brought them to such a pass. But from Fortress Monroe and Key
West to Cairo, I never heard one solitary indication of such a feeling.
Many men criticised Mr. Davis’ conduct of the war with severity; but
wherever an expression was made at all, it was one of sympathy for his
fate, and of indignation at the thought of awarding him any other
punishment than was allotted to the humblest follower in the cause. “He
was but our agent,” they said. “He only did our bidding. Our fault with
him was that he didn’t do it as skillfully as we expected.”
General Lee was everywhere reverenced. The common form of allusion to
him was, “that great and good man.” In Mobile, and throughout the
Mississippi Valley, General Jos. E. Johnston was an universal favorite.
Beauregard had an ovation when he returned. In New Orleans, the
bitterest complaint against the President’s Amnesty Proclamation was,
that under it they would be compelled to select obscure persons, or
new-comers, for Representatives, “instead of our old and tried leaders.”
But there were very distinct traces of State jealousy. “Those d———d
Hotspurs of Charleston were very keen to get us into this scrape,” said
a North Carolinian, “and now, after sending us poor troops through the
war, they’re sneaking off to Mexico, instead of staying with us to stand
it out.” Tennesseeans were not general favorites; and it was amusing to
hear the contempt showered upon the once petted Kentuckians. “Poor
braggadocio devils! After all their strut and swagger, they didn’t know
which side they were on, and stood, like a pack of half-scared curs,
growling at both.” Missouri, on the other hand, was often praised.
Several times I heard the statement, that “Missouri troops were among
the very best in the Confederate army.”
I have already said that we found no Union party in the South, in the
months immediately following the close of the war. I should have
excepted the negroes. The prevalent stories of their fidelity to their
masters were preposterously false. Not one negro in a thousand hoped for
the success of the rebellion, or was without some pretty distinct notion
of his personal interests in the issue. They often served or saved
masters to whom they were personally attached, even in the most critical
moments of danger, but this did not in the slightest degree affect their
desire for the triumph of the Yankees.
The expectation was general, among the more intelligent, that suffrage
would be given them, and many were beginning to assert their claim to
lands. How far they were qualified for giving their voice in public
affairs, we had no very satisfactory means of judging. We saw mainly
those in cities, or near the armies, and in most cases these were the
brighter and more intelligent. In Charleston, Savannah, Mobile, and New
Orleans, the masses of resident negroes seemed to me quite as orderly,
respectable, and intelligent as many of the voters in New York that help
to elect mayors like Mr. Fernando Wood.
But we were constantly told that the plantation hands in the interior
were a different order of beings. We saw many plantation hands, as on
the Sea Islands, and at numerous other points, who were the superiors in
good-breeding, and not much the inferiors in education, of many of the
“poor whites;”[41] but these, we were always assured, were only the
smart ones, who knew enough to run away. Could we but see the stupid
residuum still in the interior, who constituted the vast majority, we
would form radically changed notions as to their fitness for any right
of a citizen, or, indeed, for taking care of themselves at all. It was
not till some months later that I was to see this stupid residuum. Till
then, I may fitly leave its description in the language of those who
professed to know it best.
But of the great masses of negroes whom we did see in May and June, two
general statements may safely be made:
They were as orderly, quiet, and industrious as any other class of the
population;[42] and,
They were far more eager than any others to secure the advantages of
education for themselves, and especially for their children.
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Footnote 41:
I have several times spoken of this class. Lest it should be thought
that I am exaggerating their condition, let me quote the description
of a writer against whom no accusation of prejudice, or lack of
familiarity with the subject, can be brought. Mrs. Fanny Kemble Butler
says of the poor whites, on page 146 of her Journal of a Residence on
a Georgia Plantation, (to wit, that of her husband):
“They are, I suppose, the most degraded race of human beings claiming
an Anglo-Saxon origin, that can be found on the face of the
earth—filthy, lazy, ignorant, brutal, proud, penniless savages,
without one of the nobler attributes that have been found occasionally
allied to the vices of savage nature. They own no slaves, for they
are, almost without exception, abjectly poor; they will not work, for
that, as they conceive, would reduce them to an equality with the
abhorred negroes; they squat, and steal, and starve on the outskirts
of the lowest of all civilized societies, and their countenances bear
witness to the squalor of their condition and the degradation of their
natures.”
Fortunately, this class is confined almost exclusively to the Eastern
slaveholding States.
Footnote 42:
This statement is literally true, but, without another, it might
convey a wrong impression. The negroes were everywhere found quiet,
respectful, and peaceable; they were the only class at work; and in,
perhaps, most respects, their outward conduct was that of excellent
citizens. But they _would_ steal. Petty pilfering seemed as natural to
three-fourths of them as eating. Our officers and missionaries thought
they saw some reformation in this respect; but there was still
abundance of room for more.