A Just and Lasting Peace: A Documentary History of Reconstruction (57 page)

Now, let us see what promise of civil service reform the Democratic candidate, Governor Tilden, holds out to us. In order to be perfectly fair to him I will quote the whole text of that part of his letter which refers to that subject:

 

The Convention justly affirms that reform is necessary in the civil service, necessary to its purification, necessary to its economy and efficiency, necessary in order that the ordinary employment of the public business may not be “a prize fought for at the ballot-box, a brief reward of party zeal, instead of posts of honor assigned for proven competency, and held for fidelity in the public employ.” The Convention wisely added that “reform is necessary even more in the higher grades of the public service. President, Vice-President, Judges, Senators, Representatives, Cabinet officers, these and all others in authority are the people's servants. Their offices are not a private perquisite; they are a public trust.” Two evils infest the official service of the Federal Government: One is the prevalent and demoralizing notion that the public service exists not for the business and benefit of the whole people, but for the interest of the officeholders, who are in truth but the servants of the people. Under the influence of this pernicious error public employments have been multiplied; the numbers of those gathered into the ranks of officeholders have been steadily increased beyond any possible requirement of the public business, while inefficiency, peculation, fraud and malversation of the public funds, from the high places of power to the lowest, have overspread the whole service like a leprosy. The other evil is the organization of the official class into a body of political mercenaries, governing the caucuses and dictating the nominations of their own party, and attempting to carry the elections of the people by undue influence, and by immense corruption-funds systematically collected from the salaries or fees of officeholders. The official class in other countries, sometimes by its own weight and sometimes in alliance with the army, has been able to rule the unorganized masses even under universal suffrage. Here it has already grown into a gigantic power capable of stifling the inspirations of a sound public opinion, and of resisting an easy change of Administration, until misgovernment becomes intolerable and public spirit has been stung to the pitch of a civic revolution. The first step in reform is the elevation of the standard by which the appointing power selects agents to execute official trusts. Next in importance is a conscientious fidelity in the exercise of the authority to hold to account and displace untrustworthy or incapable subordinates. The public interest in an honest, skilful performance of official trust must not be sacrificed to the usufruct of the incumbents. After these immediate steps, which will insure the exhibition of better examples, we may wisely go on to the abolition of unnecessary offices, and, finally, to the patient, careful organization of a better civil service system, under the tests, wherever practicable, of proved competency and fidelity.

 

When you have read this somewhat elaborate paragraph and pondered over it a while, you still ask yourselves: How far does he mean to go and where does he mean to stop? There is plenty of well-expressed criticism; but what is the tangible, specific thing he means to do? The difference between these utterances and those contained in Governor Hayes's letter is striking and significant. There are none of the precise, clean-cut, sharply-defined propositions put forth by Governor Hayes, indicating how the spoils system with its demoralizing influences is to be eradicated and what is to be put in its place.

When we try to evolve from this mountain of words the practical things which Governor Tilden promises to do, we find that they consist simply in the appointment of new men, according to an “elevated standard,” whatever that may be, and in holding officers to account for their doings, of course. When the offices are filled with new men superfluous offices are “wisely” to be cut off, and finally the “patient and careful organization of a better civil service system” is to be proceeded with “under the tests, whenever practicable, of proved competency and fidelity.” It seems, then, when we boil it all down and I think I am doing Governor Tilden's language no violence in saying so that, first, the offices are to be filled with good Democrats in the way of a “clean sweep” and a “new deal of the spoils,” and that afterwards it shall be “patiently and carefully” considered how and where “tests of proven competency and fidelity” can be established, so as to fill the offices with good men. But, first of all things, “the offices for the Democrats, the spoils for the victors.” Does any candid man pretend that it means anything else? Governor Tilden is a profuse writer, having an infinite assortment of words at his command. If he meant anything else, would he not have been able to say so in a precise form of expression? For the short allusion to subsequent systematic reform, to be “patiently and carefully” approached, is even more studiously vague and shadowy than the many paragraphs in party platforms, with the valuelessness of which we have in the course of time become so justly disgusted.

Or is there any sensible man in the land, even among Governor Tilden's independent friends, who expects anything else than simply a new distribution of the spoils? If there is, let him read the Democratic newspapers, let him look round among the leaders as well as the rank and file, and he will soon become aware of his mistake. Who does not know that the principle, “To the victors belong the spoils,” was first inaugurated by the Democratic party; that the spoils system of the civil service was developed by that party in all its characteristic features; that for the last forty years it has been its traditional and constant policy and practice, and at this moment their struggle for success is in a great measure inspired by the hope of an opportunity to precipitate themselves upon the public plunder? Is Governor Tilden the man, in case of his election, to constitute himself a breakwater against the universal tendency, the unanimous, impatient will of his party? Or is there, I ask you candidly, and especially those of my independent friends who, although animated with the desire of genuine reform, are inclined to aid the Democrats, is there in the Democratic party any influential element that would urge a Democratic President to advance thorough measures of civil service reform in a non-partisan sense, or that would earnestly support him if he did? If there exists such an influential element, where is it? Is it in the rich men's Manhattan Club, or in Tammany Hall or anti-Tammany in New York, among the “swallow-tails” or the “short-hairs”? Or is it among the old State-rights Democrats, East and West? Or among the Confederates in the South? Or among the Irish population or the Roman Catholic Democrats generally? If there is in any section of the Democratic party any desire for a genuine reform of the civil service, anything but a demand for a new deal of the spoils, show it to me. I shall certainly be the last man to deny that there are many good, honest, patriotic, well-meaning and able citizens in the Democratic organization and among its leaders. I count among them not a few valued and trusted personal friends. But where are the advocates of genuine civil service reform among them? As far as I know, we have heard only the solitary voice of Senator Gordon, who submitted in the last session of Congress a commendable proposition for the reform of the revenue service; but the commendation it received in the organs of public opinion came almost exclusively from the Republican or independent side. And now will Governor Tilden, if elected, without support in his own party, at the risk of his popularity with his own friends, brace himself up against the furious onset of hungry patriots, and say: “The interests of the service, the cause of reform, demand that the offices of the Government be no longer looked upon as the spoils of party victory; I shall, therefore, keep in office all faithful and efficient officers no matter whether they are Republicans, and turn out only the unworthy ones; go home, my Democratic friends, that I may judiciously discriminate at leisure”? Or will he tell Democratic Congressmen: “The principles on which the civil service is to be reformed demand that I should not permit any Congressional interference with the responsibilities of the appointing power; therefore put your recommendations of your friends in your pockets and let me alone, my good fellow-Democrats”?

What man in his five senses expects Governor Tilden to do this? Has he ever promised anything of the kind? Certainly he has not. Is he not too inveterate a Democrat and too closely wedded to the traditions of his party to think of it?

Well, then, what sort of reform will be brought about by a Democratic victory? I assume even that Governor Tilden and the men he may put into his Cabinet will sincerely desire to put only the best available Democrats into office, and will employ every honest effort to that end. But what will be the result? The accession of the Democrats to power will be signalized by the most furious rush for office ever witnessed in the history of this Republic. For years and years hundreds of thousands have been lying in wait, eagerly watching for the opportunity. You find them not only in the North, East and West, but still more in the South. The Southern people have many good qualities, but it is a notorious fact that among them the number of men thinking themselves peculiarly entitled to public place has always been conspicuously numerous. Now they have been on short fare for many years, and long waiting has sharpened their appetite. They will also be quick to remember that Democratic success could be brought about only by a united Southern vote, and that above all others they have claims to reward. Our brave Confederate friends have won renown by many a gallant charge during the war, but all their warlike feats will be left in the shade by the tremendous momentum of the charge they will execute upon the offices of the Government. It will be a rush of such eagerness, turbulence and confusion that men of this generation will in vain seek for a parallel. And now amidst all this, urged on by a universal cry of impatience from all sections of the Democratic party that every radical must be driven from place at once, do you think it for a moment possible that the President and the members of the Cabinet will breast that storm and sit down with cool deliberation, to gather evidence about the character and qualifications of every applicant for the seventy or eighty thousand places to be filled, so as to keep improper men out of office? Is it not absolutely certain that the offices will be filled helter-skelter, as so often before, and that of the applicants those, as a rule, will be the most successful who are the most intrusive and persistent in elbowing their way to the front? Can it in the nature of things be otherwise? And what will become of the cause of reform? . . .

I, therefore, declare this to be my honest conviction, not only that Governor Hayes, as a man of patriotism and integrity, will, if elected to the Presidency, be true to his word, in using all the Constitutional powers of his office to carry out to the letter the program put forth by himself, but that, powerful as the opposition he will have to encounter may be, the chances will be strongly in favor of the success and lasting establishment of the reformed system, sustained as it will be by the best elements of the Republican party and a patriotic public opinion.

Indeed, when examining the relative positions taken by the two candidates for the Presidency, and the prospects they open to us, the opponents of Governor Hayes seem to be utterly at a loss to discover a flaw in the systematic reform he proposes to establish. They find themselves forced back upon the small expedient of discrediting his intentions. “Governor Hayes,” they say, “cannot be in earnest with this plan, for if he were believed to be in earnest there would be a multitude of Republican politicians who would rather see their candidate defeated than such a reform succeed.” There may be such Republican politicians. But Governor Hayes's own word, publicly spoken, warrants me in telling you that he is in earnest, and uncompromisingly in earnest. If there were Republicans who would try to defeat him for that reason, I am confident it would not change his position. Governor Hayes will ever be proud to have stood up for so good a cause, and would rather be defeated as its faithful champion, than succeed by betraying it. But now I ask you, my independent friends, if that cause is so good that the spoils politician would fear its success more even than the failure of his party, is not there, for you, as sincere friends of reform, every reason to desire and work for its triumph? Considering with candor every circumstance surrounding us, carefully weighing every probability and feeling the necessity of thorough and lasting reform, is it possible that you should hesitate in your choice? Can you fail to see that here is a battlefield worthy of your efforts, here the line of advance towards the objects which, as true reformers, you must hold highest? A change! is your cry. Yes, a change! is mine. But do you not, with me, insist upon a change that opens the prospect of lasting improvement? Is a change of parties all you want, whatever the consequence? If you are in earnest, you will want more; you will want a change in the very being, in the nature of parties.

That is the great thing needful. But in the success of Hayes, not that of Tilden, will you find it. Can you doubt, then, that a change to Hayes will be a greater and much more wholesome change than that to Tilden? What is a change to Tilden? A change from Republican to Democratic spoils in politics. What is a change to Hayes? A change from the spoils system to a true reform of the civil service and the overthrow of machine politics. That is the prediction I make, and with confidence I look into the future to see it verified. Can the duty of sincere friends of reform be doubtful? I at least see mine as clearly as ever, and to the last will I perform it.

(July 1878)

In 1877, the year Hayes assumed the presidency, Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823–1911) left Rhode Island for the South, making a sentimental tour of the scenes of his Civil War military experiences in Virginia, South Carolina, and Florida. Americans remember Higginson, the Harvard-trained Unitarian minister, as a fervent abolitionist, freedom fighter in “Bleeding Kansas,” supporter of John Brown, and colonel of the First South Carolina Volunteers, the earliest regiment of emancipated slaves mustered into the U.S. Army. Higginson's accurate and detailed
Army Life in a Black Regiment
(1870), originally published as essays in
Atlantic Monthly
, was an important Reconstruction era text celebrating black equality and manhood. It remains a literary masterpiece. Higginson's 1878 “Some War Scenes Revisited” provides a clear-eyed Northerner's view of Southern conditions as Reconstruction faded into memory. The blacks he encountered exhibited “much more manhood than they once did,” the “results from the changed feeling created toward a race of freedmen and voters.”

Nothing in actual life can come so near the experience of Rip Van Winkle as to revisit war scenes after a dozen years of peace. Alice's adventures in Wonderland, when she finds herself dwarfed after eating the clover leaf, do not surpass the sense of insignificance that comes over any one who once wore uniform when he enters, as a temporary carpet-bagger, some city which he formerly ruled or helped to rule with absolute sway. An ex-commander of colored troops has this advantage, that the hackmen and longshore-men may remember him if nobody else does; and he at once possesses that immense practical convenience which comes only from a personal acquaintance with what are called the humbler classes. In a strange place, if one can establish relations with a black waiter or a newspaper correspondent, all doors fly open. The patronage of the great is powerless in comparison.

When I had last left Jacksonville, Florida, in March, 1864, the town was in flames: the streets were full of tongues of fire creeping from house to house; the air was dense with lurid smoke. Our steamers dropped rapidly down the river, laden to the gunwale with the goods of escaping inhabitants. The black soldiers, guiltless of all share in the flames, were yet excited by the occasion, recalled their favorite imagery of the Judgment Day, and sang and shouted without ceasing. I never saw a wilder scene. Fourteen years after, the steamboat came up to the same wharf, and I stepped quietly ashore into what seemed a summer watering-place: the roses were in bloom, the hotel verandas were full of guests, there were gay shops in the street, the wharves were covered with merchandise and with people. The delicious air was the same, the trees were the same; all else was changed. The earthworks we had built were leveled and overgrown; there was a bridge at the ford we used to picket; the church in whose steeple we built a lookout was still there, but it had a new tower, planned for peaceful purposes only. The very railroad along which we skirmished almost daily was now torn up, and a new track entered the town at a different point. I could not find even the wall which one of our men clambered over, loading and firing, with a captured goose between his legs. Only the blue sky and the soft air, the lovely atmosphere of Florida, remained; the distant line of woods had the same outlook, and when the noon guns began to be fired for Washington's birthday I could hardly convince myself that the roar was not that of our gunboats, still shelling the woods as they had done so many years before. Then the guns ceased; the past withdrew into yet deeper remoteness. It seemed as if I were the only man left on earth to recall it. An hour later, the warm grasp of some of my old soldiers dispelled the dream of oblivion.

I had a less vivid sense of change at Beaufort, South Carolina, so familiar to many during the war. The large white houses still look peacefully down the placid river, but there are repairs and paint everywhere, and many new houses or cabins have been built. There is a new village, called Port Royal, at the railroad terminus, about a mile from my first camp at Old Fort plantation; and there is also a station near Beaufort itself, approached by a fine shell-road. The fortifications on the old shell-road have almost disappeared; the freedmen's village near them, named after the present writer, blew away one day in a tornado, and returned no more. A great national cemetery is established near its site. There are changes enough, and yet the general effect of the town is unaltered; there is Northern energy there, and the discovery of valuable phosphates has opened a new branch of industry; but after all it is the same pleasant old sleepy Beaufort, and no military Rip Van Winkle need feel himself too rudely aroused.

However, I went South not to see places, but people. On the way from Washington I lingered for a day or two to visit some near kinsfolk in Virginia, formerly secessionists to a man, or, to be more emphatic, to a woman. Then I spent a Sunday in Richmond, traversed rapidly part of North Carolina and Georgia, spent a day and two nights in Charleston, two days at Beaufort, and visited various points in Florida, going as far as St. Augustine. I had not set foot in the Southern States for nearly fourteen years, but I remembered them vividly across that gap of time, and also recalled very distinctly a winter visit to Virginia during college days. With these memories ever present, it was to me a matter of great interest to observe the apparent influence of freedom on the colored people, and the relation between them and the whites.

And first, as to the material condition of the former slaves. Sydney Smith, revisiting Edinburgh in 1821, after ten years' absence, was struck with the “wonderful increase of shoes and stockings, streets and houses.” The change as to the first item, in South Carolina, tells the story of social progress since emancipation. The very first of my old acquaintances whom I met in that region was the robust wife of one of my soldiers. I found her hoeing in a field, close beside our old camp-ground, I had seen that woman hoeing in the same field fifteen years before. The same sky was above her, the same soil beneath her feet; but the war was over, slavery was gone. The soil that had been her master's was now her own by purchase; and the substantial limbs that trod it were no longer bare and visibly black, but incased in red-striped stockings of the most conspicuous design. “Think of it!” I said to a clever Massachusetts damsel in Washington, “the whole world so changed, and yet that woman still hoes.” “In hose,” quoth the lively maiden; and I preserve for posterity the condensed epigram.

Besides the striped stockings, which are really so conspicuous that the St. Augustine light-house is painted to match them, one sees a marked, though moderate progress in all the comforts of life. Formerly the colored people of the sea islands, even in their first days of freedom, slept very generally on the floor; and when our regimental hospital was first fitted up, the surgeon found with dismay that the patients had regarded the beds as merely beautiful ornaments, and had unanimously laid themselves down in the intervening spaces. Now I noticed bedstead and bedding in every cabin I visited in South Carolina and Florida. Formerly the cabins often had no tables, and families rarely ate together, each taking food as was convenient; but now they seemed to have family meals, a step toward decent living. This progress they themselves recognized. Moreover, I often saw pictures from the illustrated papers on the wall, and the children's school-books on the shelf. I rarely met an ex-soldier who did not own his house and ground, the inclosures varying from five to two hundred acres; and I found one man on the St. John's who had been offered $3000 for his real estate. In many cases these homesteads had been bought within a few years, showing a steady progress in self-elevation.

I do not think the world could show a finer sample of self-respecting peasant life than a colored woman, with whom I came down the St. John's River to Jacksonville, from one of the little settlements along that magnificent stream. She was a freed slave, the wife of a former soldier, and was going to market, basket in hand, with her little boy by her side. She had the tall erect figure, clear black skin, thin features, fine teeth, and intelligent bearing that marked so many of my Florida soldiers. She was dressed very plainly, but with scrupulous cleanliness: a rather faded gingham dress, well-worn tweed sack, shoes and stockings, straw hat with plain black ribbon, and neat white collar and cuffs. She told me that she and her husband owned one hundred and sixty acres of land, bought and paid for by their own earnings, at $1.25 per acre; they had a log-house, and were going to build a frame-house; they raised for themselves all the food they needed, except meat and flour, which they bought in Jacksonville. They had a church within reach (Baptist); a school-house of forty pupils, taught by a colored teacher; her husband belonged to the Good Templars, as did all the men in their neighborhood. For miles along the St. John's, a little back from the river, such settlements are scattered; the men cultivating their own plots of ground, or working on the steam-boats, or fishing, or lumbering. What more could be expected of any race, after fifteen years of freedom? Are the Irish voters of New York their superiors in condition, or the factory operatives of Fall River?

I met perhaps a hundred men, in different places, who had been under my command, and whose statements I could trust. Only one of these complained of poverty; and he, as I found, earned good wages, had neither wife nor child to support, and was given to whisky. There were some singular instances of prosperity among these men. I was told in Jacksonville that I should find Corporal McGill “de most populous man in Beaufort.” When I got there, I found him the proprietor of a livery stable populous with horses at any rate; he was worth $3000 or $4000, and was cordial and hospitable to the last degree. At parting, he drove me to the station with his best carriage and horses; and I regret to add that while he was refusing all compensation his young steeds ran away, and as the train whirled off I saw my “populous” corporal double-quick down the shell-road, to recapture his equipage. I found Sergeant Hodges a master carpenter at Jacksonville; Corporal Hicks was a preacher there, highly respected; and I heard of Corporal Sutton as a traveling minister farther up the river. Sergeant Shemeltella, a fine-looking half-Spaniard from St. Augustine, now patrols, with gun in hand, the woods which we once picketed at Port Royal Ferry, and supplies game to the markets of Charleston and Savannah. And without extending the list I may add that some of these men, before attaining prosperity, had to secure, by the severest experience, the necessary judgment in business affairs. It will hardly be believed that the men of my regiment alone sunk $30,000 in an impracticable building association, and in the purchase of a steamboat which was lost uninsured. One of the shrewdest among them, after taking his share of this, resolved to be prudent, put $750 in the Freedmen's Bank, and lost that too. Their present prosperity must be judged in the light of such formidable calamities as these.

I did not hear a single charge of laziness made against the freed colored people in the States I visited. In Virginia it was admitted that they would work wherever they were paid, but that many were idle for want of employment. Rev. Dr. Pinckney, in a recent address before the Charleston Historical Society, declares that the negroes “do not refuse to work; all are planting;” and he only complains that they work unskillfully. A rice-planter in Georgia told me that he got his work done more efficiently than under the slave system. Men and women worked well for seventy-five cents a day; many worked under contract, which at first they did not understand or like. On the other hand, he admitted, the planters did not at once learn how to manage them as freedmen, but had acquired the knowledge by degrees; so that even the strikes at harvest-time, which had at first embarrassed them, were now avoided. Another Georgia planter spoke with much interest of an effort now making by the colored people in Augusta to establish a cotton factory of their own, in emulation of the white factories which have there been so successful. He said that this proposed factory was to have a capital of fifty thousand dollars in fifty dollar shares, and that twenty-eight thousand dollars of it were already raised. The white business agent of one of the existing factories was employed, he said, as the adviser of those organizing this. He spoke of it with interest as a proper outlet for the industry of the better class of colored people, who were educated rather above field labor. He also spoke with pride of the normal school for colored people at Atlanta.

The chief of police in Beaufort, South Carolina, a colored man, told me that the colored population there required but little public assistance, though two thousand of them had removed from the upper parts of the State within a year and a half, thinking they could find better wages at Beaufort. This removal struck me as being of itself a favorable indication, showing that they were now willing to migrate, whereas they were once hopelessly fixed to the soil, and therefore too much in the power of the land owners. The new industry of digging phosphates for exportation to England employs a good many in Beaufort County, and they earn by this from seventy-five cents to a dollar a day. Others are employed in loading vessels at the new settlement of Port Royal; but the work is precarious and insufficient, and I was told that if they made two dollars a week they did well. But it must be remembered that they have mostly little patches of land of their own, and can raise for themselves the corn and vegetables on which they chiefly live. I asked an old man if he could supply his family from his own piece of ground. “Oh, yes, mars'r,” he said (the younger men do not say “mars'r,” but “boss”), and then he went on, with a curious accumulation of emphasis: “I raise plenty too, much more dan I destroy,”—meaning simply “very much more.”