v1.1.1 / chapter 90 of 93 / 01 sep 07 / greg goebel / public domain
* The end of the war left open the question of what would be done with the conquered South, in particular what kind of social order would rise from the ruins of the old. The Radical Republicans wanted to reshape the South according to their ideals, but this was easier said than done, both because of Andrew Johnson's obstruction and Southern resistance. The Radicals did come close to removing Andrew Johnson from office, but by the end of Johnson's term in 1868, the balance had tipped away from the Radicals.
* With the end of the war, most of the Union soldiers were given mustering-out pay and sent home at Federal expense. Southern soldiers had to make their way home as best as they could, begging what little food was available from people who were not well off themselves. Many of the veterans were disabled, missing eyes or arms or legs, making their situation even more difficult.
Large regions of the South had been shattered and impoverished by the war. A New England journalist named Sidney Andrews visited the South some months after the end of the war, and described Charleston, South Carolina, in one of his reports: "A city of ruins, of desolation, of vacant houses, of widowed women, of rotting wharves, of deserted warehouses, of weed-wild gardens, of miles of grass-grown streets, of acres of pitiful and voiceful barrenness." Columbia, South Carolina, was even more appalling: "It is now a wilderness of ruins. Its heart is but a mass of blackened chimneys and crumbling walls."
Another visitor from the North surveyed the path that Sherman's army had left while passing through the state: "Many miles like a broad black streak of ruin and desolation -- the fences all gone; lonesome smoke stacks, surrounded by dark heaps of ashes and cinders, marking the spots where human habitations had stood."
The South had expended all its financial capital in the war. Southern citizens who had invested in Confederate central and state government bonds lost all their money. The emancipation of slaves resulted in an enormous loss of capital. Plantations and farms lay idle, roads and bridges were in disrepair or ruined, factories were burned and gutted, and the rail system, not particularly strong to begin with, had been almost completely destroyed, with irons tied around trees as Sherman bowties. Even the cotton crop had been expropriated by the Federals. One hotelkeeper said of the Yankees: "They've left me with one inestimable privilege, to hate 'em. I git up at half-past four in the morning and sit up 'till twelve at night to hate 'em."
The most immediate problem was simple starvation. The Federal government lacked a comprehensive plan for rebuilding the South, but some measures were taken to help the defeated Southerners. In March 1865, the US Congress had established the Freedman's Bureau, led by Oliver Howard, to assist the liberated slaves. The Freedman's Bureau was also empowered to help whites who had sworn loyalty to the United States, and so between 1865 and 1870 the bureau distributed over 21 million rations, with a quarter of them going to starving white people. This act of sensible compassion was appreciated by Southerners who were not too far gone in their resentment. One wrote: "There is much in this that takes away the bitter sting ... Even crippled Confederate soldiers have their sacks filled and are fed."
Another saving grace was that though the Federal military occupation of the South was humiliating and oppressive to Southerners, as mentioned there were no widespread reprisals against Confederate officials. In fact, to an extent, there was a revival of Southern patriotism to the Union. In the spring of 1868, a Wisconsin farmer named Gilbert H. Bates, who had been a Union sergeant, walked through the South from Vicksburg to Richmond, wearing his Union Army uniform and carrying the Stars and Stripes, in an effort to confirm Southern loyalty.
It is hard to determine how much to make of such a stunt, but Bates, who was unarmed and carried neither food nor money, reported that he was treated kindly and warmly, given lodging and sustenance, even when he walked over routes where Sherman's army had left destruction in their path. In fact, when he arrived at Richmond, he was greeted with the cheers of crowds and salutes of cannon. There were in fact many Southerners who believed their struggle for independence had been noble, but who had come to realize that secession hadn't been a good idea, and that the South was better off without slavery. Bates went to England in 1872 to perform a similar exercise, marching from the Scots border to London to prove that Anglo-American frictions had faded, and was welcomed as a celebrity.
Sergeant Bates' walk through the South was in modern terms a "feelgood exercise". It is hard to find fault with it in itself, but it only went so deep. Even at the time of his walk, the South was in the painful processes of readmission to the Union and determining its new social and racial order. Neither of these processes were characterized by much in the way of shining ideals.
* Reconstruction took twelve years. The US Constitution, having said nothing in specific about secession, of course said nothing in specific about Reconstruction of states that had seceded, and so it was almost anybody's guess of how to go about it. Lincoln had given considerable thought to the process by which the rebel states were to be readmitted to the Union, and as discussed in earlier chapters he had made his beliefs on the matter clear. The Radicals in Congress felt that Lincoln's approach was much too lenient, and preferred a more punitive approach.
There was not only the problem of what to do with the rebels, but of what to do with the slaves who had been freed by the war. The question of civil rights for the freed blacks was politically tricky. Free blacks did not have civil rights in most "free" states of the Union. Only Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, Wisconsin, and Rhode Island even gave blacks the unrestricted right to vote. In 1867, Connecticut, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, and Ohio considered full suffrage for blacks and rejected it.
Many in positions of power did not feel that indiscriminately giving the vote to illiterate ex-slaves was wise, but many of the Radical Republicans in Congress believed in Negro suffrage as a matter of principle, and also as a means of strengthening the Republican hold on the South. There was also the issue of land redistribution. Sherman's Special Field Order Number 15 had put in motion the redistribution of land in the coastal islands, but the government had not confirmed the titles to the land parceled out to the black folk. Conservatives disliked the concept of land distribution, moderates were uncertain, while Radicals were all for it -- though some tempered the notion by suggesting that the Federal government buy up lands instead of simply seizing them. In sum, circumstances were such that no policy could please everybody.
Exactly what would Abraham Lincoln would have accomplished had been able to complete his second term in office is a topic that has been endlessly discussed. The Radical Republicans hadn't liked his ideas on Reconstruction and he would have been forced to compromise in many ways, but he was a shrewd negotiator and the odds were that he would have got more than his half a loaf out of it. Lincoln was also an astute visionary, and though he played his ideological cards close to his vest and was always willing to trim to the winds of practicality, he did have strong ideals and a desire to put them into practice. There is no way of knowing what would have really happened, that being an alternate history that ceased to exist the instant John Wilkes Booth pulled the trigger on his derringer, but it seems hard to believe that it wouldn't have turned out better than it did under Johnson, a person who hardly knew the meaning of the work "compromise".
Johnson was an extremely strong-willed man. He had been born poor, working his way up, teaching himself to read, setting up a successful business as a tailor, and then moving into politics. He was a Democrat who stayed with the Union when his state left it, and when the state was returned to the Union by force he was its military governor for three years, a target for widespread hatred. He was hard-minded and charmless. No pictures of him seem to show him with anything but a deep-seated scowl on his face. However, Johnson's real problem was his lack of ideas. He had been signed on to the Lincoln presidential ticket in 1864 in order to bring in votes from loyalist Democrats, and in many ways his instincts ran crossways to those of Lincoln.
Johnson was a solid State's Rights man, a person who believed in the Constitution with the conviction of a Biblical literalist, and a white supremacist who believed that free blacks should be kept in their place. He was narrow-minded, arrogant, incapable of building a consensus or seeing an alternate point of view -- a builder of moats, not bridges. In some ways, everyone would have been better off if he hadn't been so courageous.
In the summer of 1865, while Congress was out of session, Johnson implemented his Reconstruction plan. He recognized the legitimacy of the state governments of Tennessee, Arkansas, and Louisiana, which Lincoln had recognized, as well as that of Virginia. In the seven other states still not readmitted to the Union, amnesty was to be given to anyone who signed the loyalty oath, with some exceptions. Once an adequate number of loyal voters had been registered, the state would then stage a convention. The convention would nullify the state's ordnance of secession, abolish slavery, and repudiate Confederate and state war debts.
Johnson's approach was tougher than that proposed by Lincoln, but it still did not go far enough to please the Radical Republicans. When Congress opened again in December, the lawmakers found themselves confronted by the representatives of eight Southern states, demanding to be readmitted. These representatives included Confederate generals, cabinet secretaries, congressmen, and even the Confederate vice-president, Alexander M. Stephens -- though admittedly Stephens had been from first to last far from the most enthusiastic of secessionists. Congress angrily refused them all admission and set up a Joint Committee on Reconstruction to specify a different program. A violent collision between the legislative and executive branches was brewing.
* Although the Radicals were extreme, Johnson did much to antagonize them, and to undermine his public position by his indifference to the troubles of the free black people. Johnson wanted no part of land redistribution to help free blacks; he shared the common view of many Southerners that black people would be much more difficult to keep down if they owned property. Johnson pardoned the original plantation owners and their old property rights on the islands were reaffirmed, and the black folk were driven off. That was the way Johnson wanted it; despite the fact that he hated the Southern aristocracy, he felt the planter elite was in the best position to control the black folk, and chose to restore the planters as the lesser of two evils. Johnson's lenient attitude towards ex-Confederates was much less driven by any sense of forgiveness than a determination to maintain white supremacy. In some cases, Federal troops performed the evictions.
Southerners clearly appeared to be taking remarkable measures to keep the black people suppressed. All four of the Confederate states recognized by the Johnson Administration passed "Black Codes", which were sets of laws that guaranteed free blacks certain rights, such as the right to marry, while denying them many more. Blacks could not bear arms, did not have the right of free assembly, could not serve on juries, could not testify against white people in court, and had limited personal and economic freedoms. At their worst, the Black Codes were designed to restore slavery under a set of legal fictions. Johnson did nothing about the Black Codes.
There had been incidents of racial violence in the South ever since the end of the war, and they seemed to be getting worse. Southerners hated the sight of black men in Union Army uniforms, and after a few soldiers got into an altercation with Memphis city police on 30 April 1866, a white mob rampaged through the black districts of the city for three days, killing 47, injuring more than 80, and burning 16 churches -- with only one of the mob injured. On 30 July 1866, a confrontation between black and white Republicans on one side and white-supremacy Democrats on the other led to an attack on the Republicans that killed 37 and injured more than 200, with 1 to 4 of the attackers killed and 20 wounded. The simple body counts suggested these were organized attacks on blacks and their white associates, not spontaneous acts of violence. Johnson said nothing, implying to critics that he tacitly approved of the intimidation designed to keep the free blacks in their place.
Although the rights of black people were not at the top of the list of concerns of most of the Northern public, the measures taken by the Southern states to suppress blacks and the bland acceptance of those measures by the Johnson administration antagonized Congress and public opinion. Why, so the thinking went, had the Union fought and won the war at such cost to have a president then let Southerners do whatever they pleased? In fact, Johnson seemed to be in outright collusion with Southern reactionaries when he vetoed an extension of the life of the Freedman's Bureau on the basis that the Constitution did not sanction such organizations. Congress pushed through the extension anyway.
Johnson's acts, or lack of them, had so far been more disturbing than damning, but on 22 February 1866 he politically shot himself in the foot. A crowd came to the White House to listen to him speak, and it was too much of a temptation for an old stump politician to resist. He grew hot and said wild things, implying some of the Radicals were traitors, specifically naming Sumner and Stevens among others, and even hinted that the Radicals were planning to assassinate him. Johnson succeeded only in antagonizing the moderates and enraging the Radicals. In March 1866, Congress passed the "Civil Rights Bill", intended to nullify the Black Codes by banning discriminatory state laws. Johnson vetoed it; the veto was overridden by one vote.
* Despite increasing polarization, when the Congressional Joint Committee on Reconstruction then finally produced its own plan for Reconstruction, proposed as a 14th Amendment to the Constitution, it was a reasonable compromise. The proposed amendment had four major features:
This seems like a reasonable document in hindsight, and even more reasonably it was submitted to all the states, even the ones that Congress did not yet recognize as readmitted to the Union, for ratification. There were 37 states, and since an amendment required a three-quarters majority, that meant that a block of ten states could defeat it.
Johnson obstinately called for its defeat. There seemed to be hope for it when Tennessee ratified the amendment, but that was misleading. Tennessee was strongly under Unionist control, the governor being none other than hardcore Unionist William "Pastor" Brownlow, who had been such an annoyance to Confederate authorities in East Tennessee that they had sent him over Union lines. Now he was back, having his revenge on the secessionists, and in pushing ratification of the amendment was also having revenge on Andrew Johnson, the two men being old and bitter enemies. When Brownlow telegraphed the results of the vote in the Tennessee legislature to the US Congress, he concluded the message with: GIVE MY REGARDS TO THE DEAD DOG OF THE WHITE HOUSE.
However, the other old Confederate states all voted against it. Kentucky and Delaware also voted against it, and the final tally was 25 states for, 12 states against. The 14th Amendment was defeated. Whatever satisfaction those who had fought against it felt was shortsighted. Like the slaveholders that Lincoln had tried so hard to deal with during the war, those who refused to play the game had not stopped it, simply dealt themselves out of it. What little spirit of compromise the Radicals felt was dead.
* There were Congressional elections in 1866, and the campaign rhetoric was very hot, with Radicals comparing Andrew Johnson to Judas and Benedict Arnold. Johnson went on an 18-day speaking tour on a special train in support of Democratic candidates, and blasted the hard-core Radicals as traitors in return, comparing himself to Jesus on the cross. Republican hecklers harassed Johnson at some of his stops, and in a few cases he got into angry exchanges that further damaged his credibility. His enemies claimed he had been drunk while making his speeches, but those who knew Johnson well replied that he always spoke like that on the stump. Johnson would have helped the Democratic cause better had he stayed in the White House and not said a word.
The abuses in the South and Johnson's lack of finesse played into the hands of the Radicals by inflaming public opinion in the North. The Republicans won a mandate they couldn't possibly have achieved otherwise, obtaining huge majorities in both houses of Congress that could easily override Johnson's vetoes. Congress passed a set of three "Reconstruction Acts" in the spring of 1867. Johnson vetoed them all, and was overridden in each case. Tennessee was now the only ex-Confederate state recognized as having been readmitted to the Union, while the state governments of the other ten were denied recognition.
In the place of those state governments, Congress established a total of five military districts, bluntly named "conquered provinces", each under the rule of an army general. The military governments of the districts were instructed to register the adult males as voters, and they did so, with more emphasis on signing up blacks than whites. Once the registration of voters was complete, the voters could then elect a convention to set up a state constitution. For the state constitution to be recognized, it had to guarantee black suffrage. The voters were then to ratify the state constitution, and then elect a state government. The state government would then be readmitted if it endorsed the provisions that had been stated in the 14th Amendment, and Congress approved. The defiance of the Confederate states in rejecting the 14th Amendment now had come back to haunt them: they were going to have to deal with it, like it or not.
The military governors were quickly appointed. John Schofield took over the first district, Virginia; Dan Sickles the second, consisting North and South Carolina; John Pope the third, consisting of Georgia, Alabama, and Florida; Edward Ord the fourth, consisting of Mississippi and Arkansas; and Phil Sheridan the fifth, consisting of Louisiana and Texas. Tennessee escaped military rule.
The Freedman's Bureau was a prime mover in the voter registration effort, with assistance from Republican Loyal League and Union League organizations. When the registration was done, there were 703,000 registered black voters versus 627,000 registered white voters. Some of the whites had been denied voter registration, but they were few in number; many others simply refused boycotted it. This proved counterproductive, since it gave the Republicans majorities and control in all ten ex-Confederate states.
The new Republican state governments still were under overall military control, but the military governors were not as a rule eager to interfere much with the workings of the states under their supervision. The generals had no explicit guidelines for their decisions. Providing such guidelines would have made things difficult, considering they were in a position that was unprecedented in the country's history, and detailed instructions passed down from the top would have tied their hands. However, at the same time, anything they did could easily be, and often was, politically controversial.
Sickles and Sheridan were unusual in their energetic enforcement of the Reconstruction Acts. Sheridan was loudly denounced as "King Philip" and Southerners were relieved when he was reassigned and replaced with Winfield Scott Hancock and then Lovell Rousseau, neither of whom felt much like rocking the boat. Rousseau was so lenient that when he died in his position, New Orleans gave him a massive funeral ceremony as a measure of public appreciation. In fact, President Johnson reassigned all the original military governors except Schofield, and replaced them with generals who took a minimal view of their job.
* The Radicals in Congress did not take kindly to attempts by the other branches of government to trim back the Reconstruction of the South. When the Supreme Court attempted to limit the powers of military courts in the military districts, Radicals in Congress passed measures to limit the Supreme Court's authority in return, and the court meekly backed off.
However, the real target of their hatred remained Andrew Johnson. To protect Secretary of War Stanton, the Radicals' inside man in the Johnson Administration, Congress passed the "Tenure of Office Act", which prevented the President from removing civil officials, even his Cabinet Secretaries, without Senate approval. Since General Grant supported the Radical's focus on military rule of the conquered Confederate states, Congress also passed the "Command of the Army Act", which forbade the President to give orders to the Army except through the commander of the Army, ensuring that Johnson could not bypass Grant.
Both of these measures were blatantly unconstitutional and would eventually be nullified, but they indicated both the might of Congress and that body's hatred of Johnson. Even though Johnson no longer had the power to be a serious obstacle to the Radicals, they looked for pretexts for removing him from office, and he finally gave them one when he sacked War Secretary Stanton in defiance of the Tenure of Office Act. Stanton barricaded himself inside his office and refused to give it up for a time. Johnson defended the action on the basis that the act was clearly unconstitutional, and the only thing he could to do obtain a judicial decision to that effect was to violate it.
The Radicals in the House framed 11 charges of impeachment against Johnson and passed them on to the Senate. Two-thirds of the Senate, meaning 36 senators, had to vote in favor of the articles of impeachment to remove Johnson from office. There were 42 Republicans in the Senate and only 12 Democrats, and Johnson's prospects for survival did not look very good.
The trial began in March 1868 and became, in modern terms, a media circus. Reporters crammed the galleries and ran off to telegraph hot scoops to their newspapers. Chief Justice Salmon Chase presided over the court and did his best to be neutral in his decisions. Five lawyers represented Johnson for the defense, and a committee of seven representatives appointed by the House handled the prosecution.
The most prominent of the prosecutors was Benjamin F. Butler, who did most of the talking for the committee. Butler made history of sorts when he held up a bloodstained nightshirt supposedly worn by a Mississippi official from Ohio who had been flogged by local thugs. From that time on, similar theatrics in Congress were described as "waving the bloody shirt". Thaddeus Stevens was also on the committee, though he was in such poor health that he once had to be carried in to the proceedings on the chair, and in fact he would die in August, at age 76 -- to be buried at his insistence in a Negro cemetery. Angry and acid to the end, Stevens represented the spirit of wrathful justice on the committee.
As with most media circuses, the event stretched out, going into April and May. Butler damaged the prosecution's case with an overblown charge that Johnson had tried to set up a dictatorship, while Johnson's defense conducted a competent defense. Johnson, having learned his lesson, was uncharacteristically subdued and even made concessions to Radical doctrine. Time was on the side of the defense, since the charges against Johnson were absurdly thin and all his accusers could really do was posture; defense only had to stall for time and let the prosecution wear itself out.
The defense strategy worked. The public, as well as politicians who didn't have such an axe to grind, tired of the proceedings and the posturing. Republican Senator William Fessenden of Maine said that he could vote against Johnson if he "were impeached for general cussedness," but pointed out "that is not the question to be tried."
Finally the matter came to a vote. The House committee asked for a vote on the 11th charge, which was a blanket item that covered most of the serious accusations against the President. Fessenden and six other Republicans broke ranks and the vote lost, 35 to 19, just one vote short. The House committee called for a ten-day adjournment, and during that time the breakaway Republican senators were put under intense pressure. Despite this, or maybe because of it, when the trial was resumed and the next two charges were put to a vote, the vote went the same way.
Judge Chase dismissed the proceedings and the Radicals gave up on their crusade to throw Johnson out of office. A HARPER'S cartoon showed Horace Greely, who had been loudly calling for Johnson's head in editorials, being revived after passing out in his office at the TRIBUNE on hearing the news, while "King Andrew" whooped it up with a bottle of booze in his hand. One of the breakaway Republic senators, Edmund Ross, was loudly denounced as a "traitor and poltroon" and lost the next election. He would not be rehabilitated for 20 years, after the hysteria had died down and people realized he had done the sensible thing when the crowd around him had rushed over the edge into lunacy.
* The impeachment proceedings were a clear farce in hindsight, since 1868 was an election year and there was no way Andrew Johnson was going to be elected to a second term. He would be out of office in less than a year, and in the meantime, confronted with a very hostile Congress, he had no way of accomplishing much. In fact, even with the failure to impeach Johnson, the Radicals were at the height of their power.
There was the irony that as Congress had imposed black suffrage on the South, black people weren't guaranteed rights in many states of the North. Southerners were quick to point out that the North was forcing rules on the South that Northern states didn't follow themselves. This hypocrisy was far too blatant, and so the Radicals pushed through the 15th Amendment of the Constitution, which would be ratified in 1870. The amendment's central clause read: "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color or previous condition of servitude."
This eliminated in principle the racial double standard between North and South and gave the Federal government a powerful legal lever against Southern reactionaries. Indeed, there seemed to be some reason for hope that the Reconstruction Acts were working as planned. Six of the old Confederate states were back in the Union by the end of 1868, and the rest were back in the fold by the middle of 1870. The Union was, at least on paper, restored.
* In fact, by 1870 there were some indications of a return to normalcy in the South. Cotton production had almost returned to its 1859 level, and would well exceed that a decade later. Mills were rebuilt, new industry was established, and the rail system was rebuilt and extended.
However, any more than a casual consideration of the details left a more discouraging impression. The economic expansion of the South lagged well behind the rest of the Union, which was undergoing rapid growth. In 1860, 30% of America's wealth was concentrated in the South, but by 1870 the proportion had dropped to 12%. Although the war had badly injured the South, it is highly arguable that long-lingering postwar Southern economic backwardness was completely the result of Northern malevolence. Southerners, always strong in their traditions, had never like the pushy and hurried capitalism of the North, and preferred to retain the old ways of doing things as much as possible. Indeed, it could be argued that had the capitalists of the North been more interested in the South, the South's postwar economic development wouldn't have stagnated as it did.
The class structure, though it had been weakened, remained in place. Large plantations survived, in a modified form, with the land worked by "share croppers" and "share tenants". Share croppers were usually blacks who essentially rented their land, homes, and equipment from a landlord, and paid the landlord a portion of their crops, usually a third to a half. Share tenants were similar, but were generally white, and usually provided their own equipment. There were many variations on these concepts.
Some of the planters found the new order agreeable. Southerners had long made much of the "social security" net provided by slavery, with the slaveowner taking care of children, the sick, and the elderly, and however well or poorly they did so, it was still more expense than they had using share croppers. The end of slavery actually meant cheaper labor -- and now even the poorer farmers who couldn't have afforded slaves were able to hire on help when they needed it.
The system basically evolved out of the simple lack of cash available to Southerners, not any grand capitalist conspiracy to exploit the workers. There was no money to pay workers, so everyone was reduced to a complicated system of payments in kind and credit. Bankers and merchants became involved with the credit system and took out liens on property as collateral. The system was insecure, since any major crop failure hit everyone in a region very hard, and led to a stifled economy, with few avenues for financial or social advancement.
* Southerners would, for good reasons, take a long time to forget their defeat and consequent humiliation by the North after the war, but occupations of rebellious provinces can last generations and are often marked by gross atrocities -- an unpleasant modern example being the killings of hundreds of thousands of civilians in the rebellious Darfur region of Sudan. The conduct of the Federal authorities in the vicious war for Missouri gave a taste of the sorts of things that might have happened, but although the Federal occupation of the South was no picnic, it lasted little more than a decade; there were no wholesale atrocities against civilians; and rebel leaders, even the rebel president, were allowed to go free instead of -- as historical precedent might have suggested -- all being hanged. Even more surprising, their property, except for slaves, wasn't seized. The indignities of the occupation were less a consequence of vindictiveness than of the simple bumbling of Nothern outsiders engaged in attempts at "social engineering" of the renegade states, in particular attempts to push racial equality.
Farmers, poor whites, and the middle class violently hated the idea of black equality, since it meant that blacks would then come into their society as peers and competitors, and since they regarded black people as inferior they felt very threatened. The idea of a white person being employed by a black man was a particular outrage. The Southern aristocracy also regarded black people as inferior, but to an extent they regarded the white "lower orders" with the same contempt. The aristocracy hated the idea of any of the poor classes being given the right to vote, and their dislike of black suffrage was a matter of degree, not kind. However, at the same time, the upper classes knew they that blacks would not be admitted into their society on an equal basis any more than poor whites would, and also felt that they would be able to manipulate blacks to vote in whatever way they felt convenient. It was easier for wealthy Southerners to adjust to the idea of black suffrage.
The Republicans imposed black suffrage on the conquered states without any consideration of the realities involved. By using the black vote, they were able to sustain Republic governments in these states for a time; in Southern legend, this was a time when their state governments were passed over to black people, but in fact blacks did not dominate state governments even in states like Mississippi, where the number of black citizens substantially exceeded that of whites.
The only state in which blacks were ever a majority in a state legislature was South Carolina. Ironically, it was this legislature that helped establish the myth of "black tyranny" through the efforts of a muckraking Northern journalist named James Shepherd Pike. Pike was a strong antislavery man who had been the ambassador to the Netherlands in the Lincoln Administration, but he was also a solid white supremacist. Pike went to South Carolina in 1873, where he observed the black legislature in action, and wrote about the ignorance and corruption he saw in newspaper articles that were widely circulated and later collected in a book titled THE PROSTRATE STATE.
Pike spoke of South Carolina government as being under the control of a "mass of black barbarism" and warned of the "Africanization" of the South. Despite that, in no state was a black man elected governor. Blacks became lieutenant governors in only Mississippi, Louisiana, and North Carolina. Blacks were also greatly underrepresented in local offices, with only one black mayor and twelve black sheriffs in all of Mississippi. Only about 20 blacks were elected to the House of Representatives during Reconstruction.
The black politicians who did acquire influence in this period were a mixed lot. One, Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback, was a classic corrupt politician, a black Ben Butler. He was said to be the son of a Mississippi planter and one of the planter's slave women, whose father had given him his freedom and sent him north. He apparently had spent some time in the employ, voluntary or otherwise, of a Mississippi riverboat gambler, who taught Pinchback every crooked trick he knew. Pinchback went South after the fall of Louisiana to the Union and served as lieutenant governor and even for a time as acting governor, where he copied the habits of Butler, once the state's military governor, using his post to line his pockets and promote his cronies.
Of course, not all the black politicians were crooks. Hiram R. Revels became senator from Mississippi, and was followed in his seat by Blanche Kelso Bruce, making them the only two black senators of the 19th century. They had both been born in the South and had gone North as young men. Revels had been born free, and obtained a degree from Knox College, while Bruce was a freedman who got his degree from Oberlin. They were both committed to furthering the rights of black people, but at the same time were concerned at inventing a system where black and white Southerners could live together amicably. Bruce was the last black senator for 90 years.
One of the most prominent black leaders in the postwar South was Dr. Louis C. Roudanz, a free black of Louisiana who had been educated in Paris and was a very wealthy man. Roudanz founded the first daily black newspaper, the NEW ORLEANS TRIBUNE, and crusaded for land reform. He blasted the Republican leadership as well as the Democrats, saying of Republican leaders that their "sole motive is greed", an observation that would be supported by events.
* The postwar Southern state governments were in general heavily controlled by white Southern Republicans, called "scalawags", and by opportunistic Northerners who had come South with their possessions in carpetbags, and so were known as "carpetbaggers".
The scalawags have been historically stereotyped as low-born and unscrupulous men on the make, but in many cases they were members of the traditional Southern power elite who felt that turning Republican was a practical and useful way to further their interests. One of the most prominent of the scalawags was Governor Joseph Brown of Georgia, who had spent much of the war doing everything to spite the Confederate government in Richmond in the name of State's Rights. With the Republicans being the power in the land after the war, he became a Republican, and when Republican power faded away in Georgia, he became a Democrat and a Democratic senator in Washington. Joseph Brown was being true to his basic principle, which was the empowerment of Joseph Brown.
Others scalawags, such as James L. Alcorn, the first Republican governor of Mississippi, went Republican simply because that was the new reality. Alcorn believed in the rights of the black man: "I propose to vote with him; to discuss political affairs with him; to sit, if need be, in political counsel with him; and from a platform acceptable alike to him, to me, and to you, to pluck our common liberty and our common prosperity out of the jaws of inevitable ruin."
Scalawags were often very willing to recognize the rights of black people as a means to the end of restoring the tattered fortunes of their states. It was a big bite for them to swallow, but they understood the necessity. However, the scalawags were gradually overshadowed by the carpetbaggers. Scalawags might court the black people's vote, but they would not associate with them. Carpetbaggers were willing to mingle with black people socially.
Carpetbaggers were also stereotyped as corrupt scoundrels, but they were a varied lot. Some would eventually melt into local Southern society, adopting much the same attitudes as their neighbors and becoming more or less accepted as Southerners themselves. Others were idealistic, sometimes too much so. Albion W. Tourgee of Ohio went South to North Carolina, where he tried to nudge the state's society to more egalitarian lines. He failed in this exercise, went back to Ohio, and wrote a semi-autobiographical novel titled A FOOL'S ERRAND that appears to have been brutally self-honest: "We tried to impose the idea of civilization, the idea of the North, upon the South at a moment's warning. We presumed that, by the suppression of rebellion, the Southern white man had become identical with the Caucasian of the North in thought and sentiment; and that the slave, by emancipation, had become a saint and a Solomon at once ... it was A FOOL'S ERRAND."
Albert Morgan came from Wisconsin to Yazoo City, Mississippi, where he and his brother tried to run a leased plantation. They failed in this, and Morgan focused on politics. He openly associated with black people, and with their help was elected state senator and sheriff. The old sheriff refused to give up his office, leading to a gun battle in which he was killed. Morgan proved to be an honest and capable sheriff, but he had stepped on the toes of the whites through his race mingling, particularly when he married a mixed-race woman from the North; she was only an eighth black, but the tale was a sensation all over the nation. The whites banded together, took up arms, and ran him out of town.
Milton S. Littlefield, who had been an Illinois general during the war, better fit the stereotype of the carpetbagger. He went to North Carolina in 1867 and also worked in Florida, involving himself in shady and profitable railroad deals. However, his deals involved prominent local figures, and in fact he was generally no more than a front man, since he had the personality of a born salesman. Littlefield left North Carolina when the state went back to Democratic rule. The North Carolina authorities tried to extradite him, but according to a story, Littlefield had no difficulty with a visitor who had come to demand that he go to North Carolina to stand trial. Littlefield gave the visitor a set of documents listing prominent North Carolinans who would have to stand trial as well, and the visitor replied: "General, I respect your condition. I do not think we will trouble you any more."
Another opportunistic carpetbagger was Henry C. Warmouth, who went South after living in Illinois and Missouri, and became governor of Louisiana. Warmouth was a pragmatist, who implemented what he perceived as prudent policies while also pursuing his own interests. He was accused of corruption -- to which he replied that he hadn't been any more corrupt than the norm for Louisiana, pointing out that "corruption is the fashion down here." Louisiana politics had been dirty long before the war and still have a reputation for dirtiness today, and some have suggested that Louisiana corrupted Warmouth instead of the other way around. After the end of Reconstruction, Warmouth settled down in Louisiana as a sugar planter, dying in New Orleans in 1931.
* Corruption was commonplace in the South during Reconstruction. There was truth in Pike's stories of the corruption of the black South Carolina legislature, but corruption was impartial, tainting black and white, Republican and Democrat. In fact, it was just as bad in the North, or worse because there was so much more to steal. When excerpts from THE PROSTRATE STATE were read on the floor of the US House of Representatives, black Congressman Robert Smalls of South Carolina asked pointedly: "Have you the book there of the city of New York?"
It was boom times in most of the country, a "Gilded Age", when there were great fortunes to be had and everyone wanted a piece of the action. This corruption aggravated the financial troubles of the Southern states, and greatly undermined attempts to build a new society. Implementing great social reforms implied great expense, for example building new schools to educate freed slaves and their children -- an even harder sell because public education hadn't been common in the South before the war in the first place. State revenues were weak, and corruption siphoned off much of what was available. Under such circumstances, the various social factions ended up fighting each other for their own slice of a skimpy pie, making class and race divisions even deeper.
The emergence of an increasingly segregated society meant that barriers to blacks began to solidify through all of Southern society. Even some black leaders encouraged the trend to an extent, feeling that there was no reason why blacks should not have their own schools and facilities, not quite realizing that "separate" was unlikely to amount to "equal". As slaves, black people had gone to the same churches as whites, though the blacks had their own section, but now two sets of church systems arose, one for whites and one for blacks. Since blacks would be shut out of almost all other commercial or civic organizations, the segregation of churchs had the odd result of turning the black ministry into a leadership class.
* Surprisingly, as the scalawags were forced out of power, many of them did not simply return to the fold of the Southern Democrats, instead attempting to form new initiatives with amazingly forward-thinking ideals. The most prominent of these new initiatives was the Louisiana Unification Movement of 1873. It was headed by Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, whose wartime credentials in service to the Confederacy were beyond reasonable dispute. Although Beauregard had suggested garroting Union prisoners when Lincoln announced the Emancipation Proclamation, as leader of the Louisiana Unification Movement he advocated a remarkable level of civil rights. The movement proclaimed full civil rights for all citizens, regardless of color, equal opportunities for employment by all citizens, and rejected segregation in education and access to public facilities.
While many influential businessmen, newspapermen, and clergymen supported the movement, they were a small minority. The mass of whites wanted segregation, and surprisingly support for the movement was weak among black people as well. Progressive concepts were simply much too far ahead of their time. The initiatives failed, and the scalawags had no other choice but to rejoin the Southern Democrats, who had begun to reconsolidate their power.
* The postwar civil-rights efforts were overbalanced by the rise of white-supremacy groups, such as the Pale Faces, the Sons of Midnight, the Knights of the White Camellia, and the Ku Klux Klan. Such groups would dress in white sheets as ghosts of rebel soldiers to terrorize and kill blacks, and run carpetbaggers out of town. Their ranks were full of ex-Confederate warriors who were no strangers to violence, and in fact Bedford Forrest helped organize the Klan, with the "Wizard of the Saddle" said to have become the first "Grand Imperial Wizard". When approached by ex-Confederate officers about the concept, the story is that he replied: "That's a good idea, a damn good idea. We can use it to keep the niggers in their place."
Such lawlessness invited official retribution, and in 1870 the Federal government moved against the Klan and other terrorist groups. Well over a thousand men were arrested. Forrest, under examination in court, claimed that he had helped set up the organization to keep the peace, and that he ordered it disbanded after realizing that it had gone out of control. His admirers today insist he was telling the truth, some even claiming that he embraced racial equality. The facts are obscure one way or another, and without any hard proof it is difficult to be persuaded that a man like Forrest -- admittedly gifted with a brilliant mind but still once a slave trader and comfortable with violence -- could ever have changed his ways so completely.
Forrest's "order" to disband the Klan was something of a joke, since he'd never had much control over it in the first place, and it was disintegrating under the wave of Federal arrests and rough justice. The organization, such as it was, disappeared, though it would be resurrected early in the next century.
However, white Southerners also formed officially legal organizations, called "Rifle Clubs" or "Red Shirts" or "White Leagues", that were more discreet and subtle in their efforts and so far more effective. Whites were pressured to toe the line, blacks were told to stay in their place. Economic pressure proved particularly useful, since any black or white person who didn't obey the rules quickly became unemployable, and was denied credit or loans. Violence was usually unnecessary, but when it was necessary, it was used without much hesitation. When election time rolled around, the White Leagues and their like would parade in the streets, heavily armed, and black folk would make themselves scarce if they wanted to remain healthy. There were riots every now and then, once again featuring one-sided casualty ratios, with many blacks killed and wounded but few, if any, whites harmed.
