A Just and Lasting Peace: A Documentary History of Reconstruction (8 page)

P
RESIDENTIAL
R
ECONSTRUCTION, 1865–67

As the Civil War ended, the question of who would direct Reconstruction remained unanswered. Unsettled too was the status and role of the South's four million ex-slaves, now freedmen and -women, in postbellum society. Lincoln's assassination added a dramatic new twist to the Reconstruction story.

With Lincoln's passing the responsibility of reconstructing the nation fell upon a most unlikely man: the Tennessee ex-slaveholder Andrew Johnson, whom Lincoln had added to his Union Party ticket to gain the support of conservative Republicans, moderate Democrats, and border state voters who had voted for Constitutional Union Party candidate John Bell in the 1860 election. Not only a former slaveholder but a lifelong conservative Democrat who believed in limited government, Johnson nonetheless was a vocal nationalist who condemned secession, and especially large planters, whom he held accountable for disunion, which he considered treason. Johnson remained loyal to the Union during the secession crisis, becoming the only Southern U.S. Senator to retain his post. To reward Johnson's loyalty, and to provide a strong presence in Unionist east Tennessee, Lincoln appointed him military governor of the Volunteer State in 1862.

Despite his strengths as a stump speaker and his loyalty to the Union, Johnson proved an unfortunate successor to Lincoln, especially when confronted with the immense task of restoring the Union in the aftermath of a horrific civil war. Such a task required diplomacy, patience, and tact, qualities that Johnson held in short supply.

Many politically astute Americans assumed that Johnson, whose bellicosity toward secessionists was legion, would commence a harsh Reconstruction policy toward the Rebels, dramatically transforming the South. Yet as president, Johnson declared his intention simply to restore (as opposed to reconstruct) the defeated Confederate states. He also made clear his unwillingness to side with Congressional Radicals, objecting loudly to their determination to institute political equality for the freedmen. Instead, Johnson attempted to carry forward what he considered to be Lincoln's plans for Reconstruction, first appointing provisional military governors in the former Rebel states, then offering lenient terms to white Southerners, allowing them to reenter the Union quickly and with minimum political rancor. Johnson's plan for restoring the Union called for the granting of amnesty for most (all but fourteen exempted classes) former Confederates, once they had taken a loyalty oath and after their states had abolished slavery and ratified the Thirteenth Amendment (passed by Congress in January 1865 and ratified in December). Johnson requested too that the former Confederate states repudiate their Confederate debt and nullify their secession ordinances.

Johnson formally announced his Reconstruction program in two proclamations on May 29, 1865. These documents stated clearly his animus toward the antebellum planter elite, his sympathy toward Southern white Unionist yeomen, and his uninterest in the freedpeople. Though the Radicals hoped to work with the new president, they soon realized that Johnson's hostility toward blacks—shrouded in states' rights rhetoric—would block cooperation and progress. “Throughout his Presidency,” Eric Foner explains, “Johnson held the view—not uncommon among Southern yeomen—that slaves had in some way joined forces with their owners to oppress nonslaveholding whites.”
23

Johnson's antiblack bias and celebration of working-class whites initially won him supporters among various Northern political factions. Moderate Republicans supported Johnson's interpretation of the essential supremacy of states' rights over federalism and of limited racial reform. Northern Democrats looked to Johnson to help revive a party riven by sectionalism and civil war. Northern capitalists, eager to increase profits, considered a speedy restoration of the Union as good for business. To their minds, political union would help restore the rich antebellum cotton trade, stimulate domestic and international commerce, and, in turn, profit businessmen north and south through the repayment of war debts. Former Confederates judged Johnson, though a combative and fiery east Tennessee Unionist, one of their own, at heart a Southern Democrat. The Radical Republicans quickly took note.

Confederate defeat in the Civil War essentially ended the question of secession as a legitimate political solution to questions of state versus federal sovereignty. The legal and Constitutional status of the freedpeople, as well as African-Americans residing north and west of Dixie, however, remained far less settled. To be sure, Lincoln's January 1, 1863, Emancipation Proclamation had theoretically freed roughly three million slaves living in territories in a state of insurrection, but in fact his military edict emancipated only around 50,000 slaves.
24

But what would be the status of all Southern blacks after Union forces finally suppressed the rebellion? Would Lincoln's decree stand up in the courts? Would the freedmen and -women be citizens? Could black males vote?

During the last months of the war, the U.S. Congress resolved the question of chattel slavery in American life once and for all by abolishing it in the Thirteenth Amendment. The process of ratifying the amendment began in several border states even before Lee's surrender. The necessary three-quarters of the states, including eight former slaveholding states, ratified the amendment on December 16, 1865, and it became part of the Constitution.

Congress took another step in helping to define the future of the freedpeople when on March 3, 1865, it established the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands (generally known as the Freedmen's Bureau), a temporary agency designed to aid freedmen and -women in the transition to a free labor economy and society, a daunting task. The bureau, according to Foner, became one of the first large-scale federal agencies. It gained responsibility for “introducing a workable system of free labor in the South, establishing schools for freedmen, providing aid to the destitute, aged, ill, and insane, adjudicating disputes among blacks and between the races, and attempting to secure for blacks and white Unionists equal justice from the state and local governments established during Presidential Reconstruction.”
25
Though criticized by contemporaries and by later historians either for overstepping legitimate bounds of government or for not providing enough relief and assistance to the ex-slaves, the Freedmen's Bureau nevertheless did achieve limited success in bringing short-term relief to blacks in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, particularly as white Southerners resisted the growth of the free-labor system. Freedmen's Bureau agents distributed food and clothing to those struggling to survive at war's end, adjudicated disputes between former slaves and ex-masters, assisted in the drafting of labor agreements, and served as liaisons between the African-American community and the federal government. The Bureau, often in conjunction with Northern Protestant missionaries, established primary schools for the freedmen. Though confronted with an overwhelming task, the Bureau remains one of the underappreciated triumphs of Reconstruction.

Johnson's eagerness to restore the Union quickly and unilaterally (especially while Congress was on recess during the summer months of 1865) and his sympathy for white Southerners (as evidenced by the leniency that he showed former Confederates) ultimately led to the failure of Presidential Reconstruction. During the summer and fall of 1865, one former Confederate state after another took steps to meet Johnson's requirements, eager to gain readmission to the Union. Their representatives abolished slavery, repudiated secession and their Confederate debts, revised their constitutions, and conducted elections for governors, state legislators, and members of Congress.

North Carolinians, for example, met on October 2, 1865, to put into place Johnson's Reconstruction plan with hopes of expeditiously restoring their state to the Union. Delegates to the state convention repealed North Carolina's Ordinance of Secession, declared slavery abolished, repudiated the state's Confederate war debt, and established the mechanism to elect a governor, state legislators, and representatives to the U.S. Congress. According to one unhappy North Carolina woman, “The N.C. Convention has prostrated the State so low and I doubt if she can find more dust to lick up. Their declaration that the Ordinance of Secession was null & void & their Repudiation of the War debt is I should think abject enough to please even a Yankee Conqueror!”
26

Though the Southern states met Johnson's stipulations to rejoin the Union, Northern observers noted how white Southerners radiated contempt for U.S. officials, seemed unrepentant for their role in what late-nineteenth-century historians termed the War of the Rebellion, elected former Confederates to high office in the fall 1865 elections and, most egregiously, refused to treat ex-slaves as freedmen and -women in deed as well as in word. “Recognizing the most limited meanings of emancipation,” explains historian Steven Hahn, “state constitutional conventions and then legislatures under Presidential Reconstruction did make provision for blacks to marry, enter into other contracts, own some property, and gain highly circumscribed access to the courts. But no state gave even fleeting consideration to any form of black suffrage.”
27
In what historian Stephen Kantrowitz considers “emblematic of this version of Reconstruction, the newly re-formed legislature of Georgia elected former Confederate vice president Alexander Stephens to the U.S. Senate.”
28
Not only did white Southerners assume that they would be led by their former leaders, but they took for granted that their former slaves would work on their farms and plantations, either for wages or for “shares” of the crop. Whites expected blacks to act as subordinates, to defer to them socially, and to retain the racial etiquette of the former “peculiar institution.” To define the conditions of their work and ensure this behavior, during late 1865 each Southern state passed ordinances specifically designed to control the blacks' mobility, their deportment, and their labor. These were the notorious Black Codes, laws so blatantly reactionary that they quite nearly nullified the spirit of the Thirteenth Amendment.

Southern state legislators fashioned the Black Codes much like the antebellum slave codes, determined to regulate the economic and social relations between whites and blacks. The codes signify as much a determination by white Southerners in the aftermath of emancipation to retain the legal and social control mechanisms of slavery as a belief that white Northerners would simply acquiesce to them. In practice the Black Codes proved so restrictive that they imposed upon the recently freed African-Americans a legal status as close to slavery as possible, what Hahn terms “a new system of group dependency.”
29
The new laws denied the freedmen the right to vote or hold office and circumscribed their economic freedom and mobility, leaving them constrained in terms of finding new employers or owning their own land. The laws also restricted the types of jobs blacks could hold.

Mississippi's infamous Black Code of November 1865 exemplified the restrictions imposed in the laws generally and served as a model for the other Southern states. The Mississippi laws prohibited blacks from leasing or renting land except in preselected black sectors, owning firearms without police permission, and selling or receiving alcohol. Moreover, vagrancy laws mandated that persons of color sign written contracts for poorly paid long-term agricultural labor, rendering them akin to peasants. Workers caught violating their labor contracts could be forcibly returned to their employer.

After months of observing affairs in the South, Northern congressmen responded to Johnson's conservative Reconstruction plan, the Black Codes, and the growing defiance by Southern state government by asserting control over Reconstruction. When the Thirty-ninth Congress reconvened in December 1865, it refused to seat the newly elected Southern congressmen, a move led by Thaddeus Stevens, a Pennsylvania congressman, and Edward McPherson, clerk of the House of Representatives. The Congress established a Joint Committee on Reconstruction, composed of six senators and nine representatives, and led by Stevens. Its mission was to report on conditions in the South and to judge whether any of the former Confederate states were entitled to representation in Congress. In 1866, the Joint Committee conducted extensive hearings, gathered voluminous testimony, and interviewed numerous Unionists, former Confederates, and African-Americans. The committee reported that Johnson's Reconstruction program fell short of protecting the freedpeople or ensuring Southern loyalty. Its findings helped usher in congressional control of Reconstruction.

(May 13, 1865)

Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner (1811–1874) ranked as one of the most consistent and forceful opponents of slavery and champions of equal rights. During the Civil War, he implored Lincoln to free the South's slaves immediately, thereby weakening the Confederacy. Sumner, a leading Radical Republican, maintained that by seceding the Southern states had committed treason (“state suicide”), thereby forfeiting their Constitutional rights. In this correspondence between members of Wilmington, North Carolina's Colored Union Leagues and Sumner, he admonished the freedmen to demand full civil rights, including the vote.

Wilmington, N. C., April 29, 1865.

Hon. Charles Sumner,
Washington
.

D
EAR
S
IR
,—We, the undersigned citizens, Executive Board of the Colored Union Leagues of this city, respectfully ask your attention to the subject of Reconstruction in this State, and for a few plain directions in relation to a proper stand for us to make.

We forward also a copy of the
Herald
, containing an article on Reconstruction, which causes us much anxiety, in connection with other facts that are constantly pressed upon our attention in this Rebel State, although much is said concerning its loyalty that is unreliable and untrue. Many of us have done service for the United States Government, at Fort Fisher and elsewhere, and we shrink with horror at the thought that we may be left to the tender mercies of our former Rebel masters, who have taken the oath, but are filled with malice, and swear vengeance against us as soon as the military are withdrawn.

We are loyal colored citizens, and strive in all things so to conduct ourselves that no just cause of complaint may exist, although we suffer much from the unwillingness of the Secessionists to regard us as
freemen
, and look up to the flag of our country with trembling anxiety, knowing that the
franchise
alone can give us security for the future.

We speak with moderation and care, we lay no charges, but we fear that an ill-judged lenity to Rebels in this State will leave little to us and our children but the bare name of freedmen. We remember Louisiana! Better “smash the egg” than permit it to produce a viper.

We beg an early answer. Direct, simply, “Alfred Howe, Wilmington, North Carolina.” Do not frank your letter: I send a stamp. For reference,

 

Jonathan C. Gibbs mentions the name of Rev. H. H. Garnett, a colored Presbyterian minister in Washington, and Hon. Judge Kelley, from Pennsylvania.

Alfred Howe,
President.

D. Sadgenar, Owen Burney,

H. D. Sampson, Henry Taylor,

Jonathan C. Gibbs, Richard Reed.

 

W
ASHINGTON
, May 13, 1865.

GENTLEMEN,—I am glad that the colored citizens of North Carolina are ready to take part in the organization of government. It is unquestionably their right and duty.

I see little chance of peace or tranquillity in any Rebel State, unless the rights of all are recognized without distinction of color. On this foundation we must build.

The article on Reconstruction to which you call my attention proceeds on the idea, born of Slavery, that persons with a white skin are the only “citizens.” This is a mistake.

As you do me the honor to ask me the proper stand for you to make, I have no hesitation in replying that you must insist on all the rights and privileges of a citizen. They belong to you. They are yours; and whoever undertakes to rob you of them is a usurper and impostor.

Of course you will take part in any primary meetings for political organization, open to citizens generally, and will not miss any opportunity to show your loyalty and fidelity.

Accept my best wishes, and believe me, Gentlemen,

Faithfully yours,

C
HARLES
S
UMNER
.