A Just and Lasting Peace: A Documentary History of Reconstruction (59 page)

It may be said, “Ah, but the real test is, Will the black voters be allowed to vote for the republican party?” To assert this crowning right will undoubtedly demand a good deal of these voters; it will require courage, organization, intelligence, honesty, and leaders. Without these, any party, in any State, will sooner or later go to the wall. As to South Carolina, I can only say that one of the ablest republican lawyers in the State, a white man, unsuspected of corruption, said to me, “This is a republican State, and to prove it such we need only to bring out our voters. For this we do not need troops, but that half a dozen well-known Northern republicans should canvass the State, just as if it were a Northern State. The colored voters need to know that the party at the North has not, as they have been told, deserted them. With this and a perfectly clean list of nominees, we can carry the legislature, making no nominations against Hampton.” “But,” I asked, “would not these meetings be broken up?” “Not one of them,” he said. “They will break up our local meetings, but not those held by speakers from other States. It would ruin them with the nation.” And this remark was afterwards indorsed by others, white and black. When I asked one of the few educated colored leaders in the State, “Do you regret the withdrawal of the troops by President Hayes?” “No,” he said; “the only misfortune was that they were not withdrawn two years earlier. That would have put us on our good behavior, obliged us to command respect, and made it easier to save the republican party. But it can still be saved.”

There is no teacher so wholesome as personal necessity. In South Carolina a few men and many women cling absolutely to the past, learning nothing, forgetting nothing. But the bulk of thinking men see that the old Southern society is as absolutely annihilated as the feudal system, and that there is no other form of society now possible except such as prevails at the North and West. “The purse-proud Southerner,” said Rev. Dr. Pinckney, in his address at Charleston, “is an institution which no longer exists. The race has passed away as completely as the Saurian tribes, whose bones we are now digging from the fossil beds of the Ashley.” “The Yankees ought to be satisfied,” said one gentleman to me: “every live man at the South is trying with all his might to be a Yankee.” Business, money, financial prosperity,—these now form the absorbing Southern question. At the Exchange Hotel in Richmond, where I spent a Sunday, the members of the Assembly were talking all day about the debt,—how to escape bankruptcy. I did not overhear the slightest allusion to the negro or the North. It is likely enough that this may lead to claims on the national treasury, but it tends to nothing worse. The dream of reënslaving the negro, if it ever existed, is like the negro's dream, if he ever had it, of five acres and a mule from the government. Both races have long since come down to the stern reality of self-support. No sane Southerner would now take back as slaves, were they offered, a race of men who have been for a dozen years freemen and voters.

Every secessionist risked his all upon secession, and has received as the penalty of defeat only poverty. It is the mildest punishment ever inflicted after an unsuccessful civil war, and it proves in this case a blessing in disguise. Among Southern young men it has made energy and industry fashionable. Formerly, if a Southern planter wished to travel, he borrowed money on his coming crop, or sold a slave or two. Now he must learn what John Randolph, of Roanoke, once announced as the philosopher's stone, to “pay as you go.” The Northern traveler asks himself, Where are the white people of the South? You meet few in public conveyances; you see no crowd in the streets. In the hotels of Washington you rarely hear the Southern accent, and, indeed, my Virginia friends declared that some of its more marked intonations were growing unfashionable. Out of one hundred and three Southern representatives in Congress, only twenty-three have their families with them. On one of the few day trains from Washington to Richmond, there was but one first-class car, and there were not twenty passengers, mostly from the Northern States. Among some fifty people on the steamboat from Savannah to Jacksonville, there were not six Southerners. Everywhere you hear immigration desired and emigration recognized as a fact. My friend the judge talked to me eloquently about the need of more Northern settlers, and the willingness of all to receive them; the plantations would readily be broken up to accommodate any purchaser who had money. But within an hour, his son, a young law student, told me that as soon as he was admitted to the bar he should go West.

The first essential to social progress at the South is that each State should possess local self-government. The States have been readmitted as States, and can no more be treated as Territories than you can replace a bird in the egg. They must now work out their own salvation, just as much as Connecticut and New Jersey. If any abuses exist, the remedy is not to be found in federal interference, except in case of actual insurrection, but in the voting power of the blacks, so far as they have strength or skill to assert it; and where that fails, in their power of locomotion. They must leave those counties or States which ill-use them for others which treat them better. If a man is dissatisfied with the laws of Massachusetts, and cannot get them mended, he can at least remove into Rhode Island or Connecticut, and the loss of valuable citizens will soon make itself felt.

This is the precise remedy possessed by the colored people at the South, with the great advantage that they have the monopoly of all the leading industries, and do not need the whites more, on the whole, than the whites need them. They have reached the point where civilized methods begin to prevail. When they have once enlisted the laws of political economy on their side, this silent ally will be worth more than an army with banners.

(February 1879)

Daniel Henry Chamberlain (1835–1907) was a Massachusetts native who, after studying at Yale and Harvard, served with an all-black cavalry troop in the Civil War and then after the war settled in South Carolina. Elected a delegate to the state's constitutional convention, Chamberlain rose quickly in South Carolina's Republican party, serving as attorney general under Governor Robert K. Scott (1868–72) and then as governor (1874–76). In condemning the Hamburg Massacre as “a barbarity which could only move a civilized person to shame and disgust,” Chamberlain drove away Democratic supporters, and he lost his bid for reelection in South Carolina's contested 1876 election. Following his departure from South Carolina, Chamberlain practiced law and became increasingly conservative in his historical memory of Reconstruction. In 1879, however, when reflecting on Reconstruction, especially the role of African-Americans in its stormy history, Chamberlain gave the freedpeople high marks. “No people or race,” he explained, had overcome so much to earn “the very highest title to exercise the rights and assume the duties of self-government.”

The condition of the colored race of the South has been, for at least forty years, the leading question in our politics. For the most part it has been an unwelcome question, forcing itself into prominence and compelling attention against the choice and interest of most of our political leaders and their followers. The two forces which would otherwise have shaped our political ends—commerce and empire—have feared and hated this issue. The business interests of the country have constantly deprecated its agitation; the pride of empire, the sentiment of nationality, has always deplored its existence and struggled to banish it from the political field. The statesmen who from 1835 to 1860 held the foremost places of political honor and influence were engaged in a continuous effort to settle it by superficial compromises. Their successors at the North, with comparatively few exceptions, refused practically to recognize its essential and controlling power except under the final stress of unavoidable necessity. The same influences were strongly felt at the close of the war. Not a few of the leaders of the party which had pushed the conflict of arms to a successful close resumed the old temper of compromise in dealing with the new phases which this question then presented. Business and the desire for a formal national unity loudly demanded the restoration of the South without further changes than such as the war had actually accomplished.

Throughout this long conflict, the history of which is too fresh to need fuller statement, the nature of the issue touched and enlisted the deepest forces that affect human society. It was primarily an ethical question, a strict question of moral right and wrong. No economical or political tests could alone decide it. Conscience and the moral sense claimed jurisdiction of the question whether the colored race should be treated as men or as brutes, as brethren or as aliens and outcasts from the human family. The moral convictions of the North would permit no settlement which did not recognize the complete manhood of this race. The stubborn and fanatic bigotry of the South would consent to no settlement which did not leave the political power of the States exclusively in the hands of the white race. Under these influences and circumstances the question, by what methods conformable to our system of government the civil rights belonging generally to other citizens might be practically secured to the colored race, became, in the judgment of a majority of the people, the most serious political problem growing out of the war. The result was the enactment by Congress, over the President's veto, of the reconstruction act of March 2, 1867, making it the condition of the restoration of the seceding States that new constitutions should be adopted, framed by “delegates elected by the male citizens, twenty-one years old and upward, of whatever race, color, or previous condition,” and securing to all such persons the elective franchise. Under the provisions of this act all the seceding States were finally restored to their practical relations to the Union.

In the light of present results, the policy of universal suffrage thus enforced at the South is condemned not only by those who originally opposed it, but by many who were hitherto its advocates. It becomes, therefore, an appropriate inquiry, whether universal suffrage at the South, or especially what is commonly called negro suffrage, was a mistake. Such an inquiry should be made, if possible, without reference to partisan opinions or interests. The present condition of the colored race of the South can not be viewed with toleration by any right-minded man who is acquainted with the facts. It is certain, too, from the nature of the question itself, as well as its close relations to all our public interests, that it will remain, as heretofore, an issue which can not be avoided. Settlements may be attempted which shall again leave this race to its fate, to an unaided and friendless struggle with the hostile forces which surround it; but such settlements will settle nothing. In the mean time it is well to consider whether whatever degree of failure may be fairly said to characterize the present results of the plan of Southern reconstruction is due either to the principle applied in the general enfranchisement of the colored race, or to the incapacity of that race to properly exercise the rights conferred.

In determining the correctness of the principle adopted in the enfranchisement of the colored race, it is essential to recall the chief features of the situation when that measure was adopted. A war of four years, with its enormous sacrifices of life and property, had just ended. The cause of the war was the existence under the Government of the republic of the system of chattel slavery. Aside from this system the Government was essentially republican. All other leading influences had, for more than three quarters of a century, tended toward its harmonious growth, development, and consolidation. Territory and population had increased beyond precedent. A commanding position had been reached among the nations. All the elements of national prosperity and greatness had been developed to a high degree. Slavery, the one anti-republican influence, had put at hazard all this growth and glory. It had struck at the life of the nation. The struggle had agonized the land. The plain and inevitable lesson of this experience was, that our Government, to be safe, must be self-consistent; that, in Mr. Lincoln's words, “this Government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free”; that no anti-republican element can be safely suffered to remain in the fabric of our Government.

This lesson was strongly enforced by the influence of the great principles which inspired the founders of our Government, and still constituted the professed faith of the republic. By those principles the nation was “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Except in the slave States the suffrage had been the sign and safeguard of that civil equality contemplated by the fathers. The extension of the suffrage had kept even pace with the progress of our most prosperous and enlightened communities. The enjoyment by all citizens of the right of suffrage was therefore regarded as the true corner-stone of our Government as well as the best if not the only guarantee of individual freedom. In fixing the political conditions of the seceding States, the traditions and principles of our Government united in pointing to universal suffrage as the true defense of public welfare and personal rights.

But, at the time of which we speak, disloyalty to the national Government characterized the whole white population of the South. The weapons of armed rebellion had but just been wrenched from their hands. To permit the political power of the restored States to be wielded exclusively by this class, was to invite the recurrence of the dangers so lately experienced. A basis of loyalty must be found on which to build the new governments. The colored race alone furnished this indispensable condition of reconstruction. Their loyalty to the Union was undoubted. It was deep, passionate, unfaltering. If, then, the conquered communities of the South were to be restored to political life and to resume their position as States, the logic of republican principles, the principles of the Declaration of Independence, and the logic of events and surrounding circumstances, alike pointed to the immediate enfranchisement of the colored race as the chief feature in a wise plan of reconstruction. Gradual enfranchisement could not meet the conditions then existing. Tests of property or education, if ever wise or admissible, under our theory of Government, were clearly inadmissible here. The application of these tests would exclude those whose influence and participation could alone insure a republican basis for the new governments and the political predominance of those who were loyal to the General Government.

Other considerations led to the same conclusions. It was believed, as the result of our political experience as a whole, that the best method of dealing with the so-called “dangerous classes”—those who have, for the most part, neither property nor education—was to admit them to the full privileges of citizenship. Such, with slight exceptions hardly requiring mention, had been the policy adopted in all the remaining States. It was believed, upon the same authority, that the exercise of the rights of free citizens was the best school for the education of the citizen in the proper discharge of the duties imposed by his rights. These beliefs were the results of experience. They were not theories merely. They were the practical, working rules by which our most successful political communities had carried on the business of government. Those who shaped the plan of reconstruction were convinced that the civil rights and future welfare of the colored race demanded that the ballot should be placed in its hands. They felt that the national Government was charged with the duty of recognizing and securing, so far as legislation could go, the complete civil and political equality of the colored race with the other races under our Government. This was especially due to that race by reason of its whole previous history in this country, as well as its peculiar position at the close of the war. But it was not sentiment alone that guided to this result. All other policies were open to insuperable objections. Direct military supervision of the South, the continuance of the abnormal condition existing from 1865 to 1867, or the return to power of those who had previously exercised exclusive political control, were the only remaining policies. Neither of these policies could be justified by reason or experience. That temporary evils would arise from the immediate enfranchisement of the colored race no man doubted, but the men who supported the measure believed, with Macaulay, that “there is only one cure for the evils which newly-acquired freedom produces—and that cure is
freedom
. When a prisoner leaves his cell, he cannot bear the light of day; he is unable to discriminate colors or recognize faces. But the remedy is not to remand him into his dungeon, but to accustom him to the rays of the sun. . . . Many politicians of our time are in the habit of laying it down as a self-evident proposition that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story, who resolved not to go into the water till he had learned to swim! If men are to wait for liberty till they become wise and good in slavery, they may indeed wait for ever.” They believed, with Mackintosh, that “justice is the permanent interest of all men, and of all commonwealths,” and that “the love of liberty is the only source and guard of the tranquillity and greatness of America.” They believed, with Abraham Lincoln, “All honor to Jefferson; to a man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day and in all coming days it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression.” To men of real faith in the principles of our government, to men who loved and practiced justice, who held that governments exist for the good of all the people, the immediate and unconditional enfranchisement of the colored race of the South was an act and policy supported by the highest sanctions of political justice and civil prudence.

The charges now brought with most frequency and apparent effect against this policy are, first, that it was unjust and cruel to the white people of the South thus to subject them to negro rule; and, second, that the enfranchisement of the colored race was a deliberate giving over of society to the control of ignorance, a reversal of the order of Nature and Providence which demands that society shall rest on intelligence and capacity, not on ignorance and inexperience.

To the first charge the reply is that colored suffrage was not the subjection of the white race to negro rule. The white race retained its suffrage, with all its immense advantages of property and education. Colored suffrage was simply placing the two races on the same plane of civil and political rights. It was the giving of a fair field and an equal chance to the members of both races. It was the removing of all legal or artificial hindrances from the path of the one race, without diminishing a single right or adding a single burden to the other race. Nor was this true only of the legal situation and relations of the two races. No restriction or hindrance in fact existed, under this policy, to the freest and most effective use and influence of all the advantages which property, education, and political experience necessarily gave to the white race as a whole. No such obstacle existed either as a proper consequence of the policy of colored suffrage, or of the temper of that race toward the other race. That policy had no elements but justice and civil equality; that temper was friendly and generous. The sole cause of the political supremacy of the colored race at the South was the willful and deliberate refusal of the white race to contribute its proper and natural influence to the practical work of government. They chose to yield to the embittering influences of defeat and race-hatred, rather than to act the part of faithful citizens in guiding and controlling those whose ignorance and inexperience most imperatively required their aid. The necessary results of such conduct on the part of a class occupying such relations to any community, under our form of government, are obvious and uniform. It was as if to-day the greater part of the tax-paying and educated class in New England and New York should cease from all influence or aid in the work of government, and sullenly leave public affairs to the control of such as might be left to take it. Or, more exactly, it was as if that class, not content with refusing all aid in the conduct of public affairs, should seek, in a spirit of bitter and vengeful hostility, to deride, dishonor, and embitter those into whose hands they had surrendered the political power. It is certain that no state or community could suffer such a separation and antagonism of its elements without plunging, more or less rapidly, into temporary misrule.