This Great Struggle (62 page)

But in the mid-1870s northern political will began to weaken. Americans are not very good at long, low-intensity wars. Eager to get on with their lives and their profitable enterprises, they readily tire of contending with the same, almost faceless enemy year after year. So it was in the 1870s. Besides that, racism was not limited to the South by any means, and those who favored civil rights for the former slaves had struggled to maintain power even in the North. After nearly a decade of guerrilla war against white-supremacist terrorism in the South, four years of the nation’s bloodiest war before that, and decades of political strife against the slave power before that, Americans were growing very, very weary of the great struggle. Their generation had accomplished much, very much, in ending slavery, but it was nearing the end of its strength.

One by one, southern states fell under Democratic rule—Tennessee in 1869, Virginia and North Carolina the following year, Georgia in 1871, Texas in 1873, and Arkansas and Alabama the year after that. And as the Republican state governments went down, black voting and civil rights winked out, state by state. As the election of 1876 approached, only four states—Mississippi, South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana—still had Republican governments, and Mississippi fell to Democratic rule and white supremacy that year.

The Republican convention that year passed up front-runner James G. Blaine and instead nominated Civil War veteran Rutherford B. Hayes of Ohio. The Democrats nominated New York governor Samuel J. Tilden. Since Tilden had suppressed the Democratic Party’s Tammany Hall, his Democratic supporters touted him as the antidote to the corruption they had for years been claiming characterized the Grant administration. Republicans emphasized that the plight of the southern freedmen and their white allies was at stake as well as the fruits of the Civil War. When election day came, Tilden carried his home state of New York, plus the Democratic Party’s most reliable northern stronghold, New Jersey. He also succeeded in snagging the northern states of Connecticut and Indiana. The rest of the North went for Hayes.

In the South, however, the Democrats carried every single former slave state with the exception of the three states where U.S. Army troops were still protecting black voting rights: South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana. Elsewhere throughout the South, the night riders of the White League and the Red Shirts, considering themselves the armed wing of the Democratic Party, had carried out the same tactics that had brought Democratic victory in Mississippi only a few months before. Brutally and aggressively they broke up Republican rallies; threatened, beat, or murdered Republican leaders and party workers; and intimidated potential voters into staying home. The tactic worked.

The Democrats also claimed victory in South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana, but Republican state authorities were able to identify more than enough blatant fraud and voter intimidation (despite the army’s efforts to keep order) to yield revised returns showing Republican victory in all three states. Slates of electors for both parties from each state demanded recognition of their votes. Hayes needed the votes of all three states to win. Tilden would triumph if he gained any one of the three.

Faced with a constitutional crisis not quite like any it had encountered before, Congress passed a bill setting up a complicated system for deciding the dispute. The law called for a fifteen-member Electoral Commission to investigate the rival claims and decide who should get the votes of the three disputed states. The commission’s members would include five senators— three from the majority Republicans and two from the minority Democrats. Five more members would come from the House—three from the Democrats, who then held the majority there, and two from the Republicans. The final five members would come from the Supreme Court—two Republicans, two Democrats, and one other chosen by those four. When the fifteen members were in place, the commission spent the month of February listening to arguments from lawyers for both sides. Then in a series of eight-to-seven votes it decided to award all twenty disputed electoral votes to Hayes, giving him the election.

The commission finished its work and adjourned on March 2. Inauguration day was two days away, and Congress still had to give its formal acceptance to the commission’s findings. Congressional Republicans naturally backed acceptance, as did the leadership of the Democratic Party, but a coterie of disaffected Democratic senators threatened a filibuster to prevent approval. This would at least delay inauguration day and exacerbate the constitutional crisis. In the end, the recalcitrant southern senators refrained, possibly, as some have suggested, because of informal discussions with representatives of Hayes who had promised them that in exchange for their acquiescence in his inauguration, Hayes would withdraw federal troops from the three remaining southern states, throwing their Republican governments to the night-riding wolves. In fact, Hayes had been talking about a pullout even before the election, and Grant had withdrawn the troops from Florida before inauguration day. If such discussions did take place, they concluded not in a formal deal but, at the most, in an informal understanding that came to be known as the Compromise of 1877.

Thus Reconstruction came to an end. The North, politically weary after decades of sectional conflict, finally gave in to white southern intransigence on the issues of voting rights and civil rights for southern blacks. White Democratic regimes came to power in all of the southern states, and they used both legal means (such as literacy tests and poll taxes) and the well-tried illegal means of lynching and intimidation to maintain their control and deny blacks the right to vote. White supremacy was maintained, and blacks were relegated to a legal netherworld of second-class citizenship known as “Jim Crow.”

By the 1890s, a renewed emphasis on national unity and sectional reconciliation led to northern acceptance of a substantial segment of the white South’s mythology regarding the nature of the conflict. In the new reconciliationist version of history, embraced on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line, the war had never had any fundamental relationship to issues of race or slavery. Each side had, so the story ran, fought nobly for a different aspect of the American ideal—the South for self-determination and the North for majority rule.

The claim of the Declaration of Independence that all men were “created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights” was best not remembered in connection with the Civil War, though it had been Lincoln’s theme from start to finish. Also better forgotten in the reconciliationist synthesis of the 1890s and beyond were the blacks themselves, who became the innocent bystanders of the war. In exchange, white southerners allowed that the restoration of the Union had been a good thing after all. That was the story the country maintained, for the most part, for the next three generations, and so the history books were written. Only in the second half of the twentieth century, with the centennial of the Civil War rapidly approaching, did Americans (or some of them) begin to recognize a much different story in the diaries, letters, and speeches of the participants, a story well known during the war but forgotten or out of the nation’s conscious memory for almost three-quarters of a century.

“THERE IS MORE INVOLVED IN THIS CONTEST”

The Civil War remains one of the largest phenomena in U.S. history, and in the nineteenth century it dwarfs all other events. About 2.9 million men served as Union soldiers during the course of the conflict, about 1.5 million of them under regular three-year enlistments. Total enrolled Confederate soldiers came to roughly 1.2 million men, of whom perhaps eight hundred thousand were long-term enlistees. This means that about one in every four northern men served in the army during the course of the war and almost one in three southern white men. Additionally, a little more than one in nine African American men served as soldiers during the war.

In numbers of casualties the Civil War far exceeded any other American conflict. The roughly 620,000 soldiers who died between Fort Sumter and Appomattox was almost half again the total U.S. dead in World War II, the nation’s second-costliest conflict. When the war dead are considered as a percentage of the country’s population at the time, the cost of the Civil War appears in even starker terms. The dead of the Civil War made up 8 percent of the total male population of the United States between the ages of thirteen and forty-three. The 360,000 northern dead equaled 6 percent of northern males of that age-group, while the South’s 260,000 deaths took an appalling 18 percent of that cohort of its population. In addition to the dead, 270,000 Union and at least 90,000 Confederate soldiers suffered wounds. To this day, about half of all the American men who have died in the nation’s wars were casualties of the Civil War.

The war brought devastation to the South, where most of the fighting and marching to and fro of armies had taken place. Many public buildings, factories, and warehouses had been destroyed, as had private houses in some areas. Thousands of miles of railroad track had been torn up and destroyed, the ties burned, and the rails heated over the fires and then twisted or else bent around trees or telegraph poles into what had been nicknamed Sherman neckties. Crops had been trampled, consumed, or burned by the armies. Burning was also the fate of untold thousands of miles of rail fence, the only barriers protecting growing crops from grazing animals. Not that there were as many grazing animals as there had been four years before. Nineteenth-century wars had a voracious appetite for horses and mules, which died in their thousands—shot, starved, or worked to death. Hogs, cattle, and poultry had found their way into the stomachs of the passing armies in vast numbers. Nearly one-third of the white men—and those the most active and vigorous—had been absent for most of the past four years, while their farms had languished and been overrun by weeds. Worst of all, the South had lost its chief capital investment and a large part of its labor force in the form of almost four million slaves, freed by the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment. The region would take decades to recover economically.

Although the conventional military phase of the conflict most commonly called the Civil War lasted from 1861 to 1865, Reconstruction represented an unconventional phase of conflict. Though unconventional, it was still very much a civil war, often with real bloodshed though not in the vast quantities the conventional phase had elicited. The U.S. government won a clear and overwhelming victory in the conventional phase of the conflict because of a combination of superior resources and manpower and superior civilian and military leadership, which overcame the Confederate advantages of the strategic defensive, the vast size of its territory, and the tangible nature of its war aims. Thanks especially to Lincoln’s superb civilian leadership, northern will to fight endured long enough to allow northern superiority in numbers and generalship to crush the Confederacy’s uniformed armies.

In Reconstruction, however, the phase of the conflict that followed 1865, the advantages went the other way. The American people have never been very good at coping with a situation that is not quite open war but not quite peace. They have also fared poorly at waging a disputed occupation far from home against a hostile local civilian population. Lincoln was gone, and even he would have had difficulty making the aim of continued struggle clear to northern voters and convincing those voters that the goal was worth the effort, especially since many even in the North partook of the racist assumptions of their day. In the end, a desperate white southern commitment to maintain white supremacy finally wore out the North’s will to complete a revolutionary transformation of society that almost no one had envisioned when the guns first spoke at Fort Sumter almost sixteen years before. The result was a modification of the original peace terms. The Union was preserved and slavery abolished, but if the slaves were not slaves any more, neither were they fully free American citizens.

Yet in noting the failure of the Civil War generation to complete the overwhelming task it faced, we should not lose sight of the amazing things it did accomplish. These were twofold. First, the Civil War generation established that a free government truly could function and survive—that, as Lincoln said, it need not be either too strong to allow its people liberty or else too weak to secure its own survival. Second, the Americans of this generation removed the blot of slavery from the escutcheon of American freedom. In doing so they had answered the question Lincoln had put to the 164th Ohio in August 1864 as to “whether your children and my children shall enjoy the privileges we have enjoyed.” If they had left the final working out of all the fruits of their accomplishments to future generations, the Americans of the 1860s had nevertheless, in what they had accomplished, risen “to the height of a generation of men worthy of a free Government.”
¹

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I
t is a pleasure to acknowledge with gratitude the kind assistance of several who have aided in the preparation of this book. Justin Solonick read and critiqued the chapters and offered many excellent suggestions for revisions. Similarly, Niels Aaboe of Rowman & Littlefield offered good ideas for the development of the work. Both have contributed to the significant improvement of the final product. Niels and the rest of the staff at Rowman & Littlefield were very supportive and patient throughout the process of writing and publishing the book. Charles D. Grear was a very helpful and competent mapmaker. His knowledge of the Civil War made the process of deciding what should go into the maps infinitely easier than would otherwise have been the case. Finally, my wife, Leah, proofread the manuscript for me and provided valuable moral support. To all I extend my sincere thanks.

SOURCES AND NOTES

PROLOGUE

1. Jim Leeke, ed.,
A
Hundred
Days
to
Richmond:
Ohio’s
“Hundred
Days”
Men
in
the Civil War
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 193.