The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896 (Oxford History of the United States)

by Richard White

Arnold’s metaphor of gestation and birth imagined two discrete worlds, one quickening as the other died, but Americans had, unknowingly, conceived twins in 1865. The first twin embodied the world they anticipated emerging from the Civil War, and it died before ever being born. The second, unexpected, twin lived, forever haunted by its sibling.

People became Republicans and Democrats because of who they were more than because of the principles they espoused. Both parties contained members across an ideological spectrum.

Gilded Age liberals sprang from a noble European and American lineage whose opposition to hierarchies and privileges made them enemies of the Catholic Church, monarchy, aristocracy, and human slavery. Nineteenth-century liberals stressed individual freedom, private property, economic competition, and small government. These ideological distinctions do not map easily onto the political beliefs of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Liberals, in particular, produced a varied progeny now scattered across the modern political spectrum. Modern liberals have inherited their namesakes’ concern with individual rights, but they do not tie those rights as closely to property as nineteenth-century liberals, and they have abandoned their distrust of government intervention in the economy. In this respect, they are more like Whigs.

Rep. James Garfield of Ohio—known as “the praying Colonel” during the Civil War—had explained why God had allowed the assassination of “the kindest, gentlest … friend” that the people of the South could expect. It was because Lincoln was too good and too kind. God had made Lincoln his instrument to save the Union, and he had become Christ-like and a martyr, but God would use sterner men to reconstruct the South. Across the North hundreds of Protestant ministers echoed this theme.

Americans mourned individually, but they also mourned collectively, and when they did it was not as a homogeneous national mass but rather as a collection of groups. Americans, particularly American men, were joiners. That the Masons had commandeered the symbolism of the state funeral was no accident; they were the most powerful of numerous voluntary organizations.

Lawyer, secretary, livery stable owner, man with no profession and no wealth, and bricklayer all presumably lived adjacent to each other in the same neighborhood. There was considerable inequality in the United States, with the top 1 percent controlling 37 percent of the nation’s wealth, but that top 1 percent hardly controlled unimaginable wealth.

By recent estimates, somewhere between 650,000 and 850,000 men died in the Civil War, with a reasonable figure being about 752,000. Roughly 13 percent of men of military age in the slave states died during the war, twice the figure (6.1 percent) of men born in the free states or territories. More were incapacitated. In Mississippi 20 percent of the state’s revenues in 1866 went to artificial limbs for veterans.

Congress had passed the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery before adjourning, but it took until December for enough states to ratify it, and only then was slavery legally extinguished in the loyal border states of Kentucky and Delaware. Emancipation remained a work in progress. The Emancipation Proclamation, the flight of the slaves, and the advance of Union armies during the war had brought freedom, of a sort, but it had also brought hunger, suffering, and death to many of those who seized that freedom. The federal government had enlisted able-bodied black men as laborers and soldiers, but often consigned their families to contraband camps or neglected them entirely. They died by the tens of thousands. Freedom that amounted to no more than the ability to sell one’s labor at what a buyer was willing to pay was a more constrained freedom than slaves had imagined.

There was violence in the South, but it was usually at the hands of white outlaws, bushwhackers, and unreconciled Confederates. Black people were victims, not perpetrators. Their collective restraint was remarkable.

Theoretically the victorious Union Army held control, but that control depended on two things. The first was the physical occupation of the South. The second was the legal right of the army to govern the South under war powers, which, in turn, depended on deciding whether war continued after the defeat of the Southern armies.

It was a celebration of a democracy in arms. As the Philadelphia North American put it, only a democracy could trust such a mass of armed men in the capital.

Seward, wounded at home by another assassin on the night that Booth murdered Lincoln, had become the leading Republican advocate of leniency toward the South. He worried about the growth of a powerful central state.

Stanton’s biographers sometimes strain for tolerance. Autocratic, duplicitous, and humorless, Stanton had initially scorned Abraham Lincoln, the funniest—at least intentionally—president the United States ever had, as a man of little consequence and less ability, and he always remained surer of himself than he was of Lincoln. Ulysses Grant, who disliked Stanton, “acknowledged his great ability” and also his “natural disposition to assume all power and control in all matters that he had anything whatever to do with.”

created the provisional government for North Carolina and provided a template that the other Southern governments were supposed to follow. In North Carolina all of those able to vote before the Civil War and who fell within the scope of Johnson’s pardons could vote. This formulation denied freedmen the franchise while granting it to men who had rebelled against the United States. By leaving suffrage qualifications up to the new legislatures, it ensured that blacks would not vote in the South. Johnson appointed William W. Holden, a secessionist who had become a peace candidate in 1864, as governor. Holden would supervise the election of a convention that would amend the state’s constitution to create “a republican form of government.”

Johnson’s answer to such objections was that he was making a distinction between individual treason and collective treason. He had no intention, at least initially, of letting individual traitors escape unscathed. He wanted to protect Southern states, not Confederate leaders. But no matter how logically plausible Johnson’s argument might seem, even he had to make exceptions to it. He, after all, was appointing provisional governors, ordering new state constitutional conventions, and demanding certain terms for reunion: agreement to the abolition of slavery, renunciation of secession, and, later, repudiation of the Confederate debt. None of this, as Schurz pointed out, was part of contemporary constitutional theory. If he could do these things, Radicals asked, why could he not demand the vote for the black male population?

Johnson was actively hostile to the Freedmen’s Bureau. Congress had established the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands on March 3, 1865, before Lincoln’s assassination. In creating the bureau, Congress gave new power to the federal government, which it would do repeatedly. More unusually, it created and staffed an agency designed to execute that power. It was, to be sure, a temporary agency, expiring a year after the Confederacy expired, but until then the Freedmen’s Bureau had the authority to govern “all subjects relating to refugees and freedmen from the rebel states.”

Thaddeus Stevens, the Radical Republican leader in the House, was ready to confiscate more land, but land confiscation and redistribution touched deep ideological nerves in the United States. In one sense, massive land redistribution was the basis of the American republic. The U.S. government took Indian lands, peaceably through treaties if it could and forcibly or through fraud and war when it thought necessary. The government then redistributed these ceded or conquered lands to white citizens. Southern redistribution, in essence, was about whether Southern whites could be treated as Indians and Southern blacks could be treated like white men.

“There is … no true republican government, unless the land and wealth in general, are distributed among the great mass of the inhabitants

belief in the broad distribution of property as the core of a republican society and the dangers the concentration of wealth presented had numerous variants that could be found in Jefferson, Jackson, and Lincoln.54

Contracts could produce exactly the kind of subordinated labor force ex-slave owners desired. The bureau’s fear of black dependency often created black dependency by driving freedpeople into contracts that impoverished them and made them reliant on their old masters.

and the Freedmen’s Bureau as both a carrot and a stick. Both he and Southerners recognized that without the army and the bureau the federal government lacked the capacity to enforce the laws Congress passed. If Southerners failed to accept his minimal conditions for readmission, then war powers, martial law, the army, and the Freedmen’s Bureau would remain. If the ex-Confederates cooperated with him, the army and the Freedmen’s Bureau would vanish from the South and the future political status of the freedmen would be left to the states.

The Southern Bourbons, as they were known, were the most reactionary elements of the old plantation elite.

Schurz’s letters and the report he eventually submitted could not have been clearer: accommodation was not working. “Treason,” he wrote, “does, under existing circumstances, not appear odious in the south.” Southerners were “loyal” only insofar as “the irresistible pressure of force” had forced them to renounce independence, and loyalty was little more than “the non-commission of acts of rebellion.”

Mississippi enacted the first Black Code in the fall of 1865, and other states followed. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Miller asserted that the codes did “but change the form of slavery,” but they were not a return to slavery. African Americans had civil rights—including contract rights—they did not possess under slavery: to marry, hold property, sue, and be sued. Yet the codes reminded both Northerners and freedpeople of a return to slavery because the most egregious of them—those in South Carolina, Mississippi, and Texas—defined black people as agricultural and domestic workers and their white employers as “masters.” The laws were as close to apartheid as the United States ever came.

Local governments intervened constantly in daily life. It never occurred to the vast majority of Americans that property was beyond public regulation or control or that its use should be left solely to private arrangements. But neither were Northerners necessarily ready to put this regulatory authority in the hands of the federal government.

So long as Reconstruction seemed to be about the transfer of power from the old Southern elite to the plain people of the South, Johnson was enthusiastically for it. When Radicals, however, pressed for equal rights, citizenship, and even suffrage for the freedmen, then Johnson’s devotion to a white republic surged to the fore. He thought that in this he had the sympathy of the Northern electorate, which thought of suffrage as a privilege rather than a right. In the fall of 1865 proposals to extend the vote to black men went down to defeat in Connecticut, Wisconsin, and Minnesota.

Stevens wanted the franchise extended to black men, and he wanted to grant them a share of the Southern property that their labor had created. His egalitarianism went only so far. Women would remain outside the electoral process. The fixation of some Republican reforms on racial injustice could blind them to a staggering array of other problems emerging in an American society that denied women many of the rights Stevens wanted for black men.

Should accommodation with Johnson fail, the Radicals prepared the ground for unilateral action by Congress. They had three powerful constitutional weapons. The first was familiar: the right of Congress to determine its own membership, that is the power to reject members even if they had won election in their states. The second, untested, weapon was the constitutional clause guaranteeing every state a republican form of government. This was, in Senator Charles Sumner’s words, a “sleeping giant.” Nothing else in the constitution gave “Congress such supreme power over the states.” The third were the war powers that allowed the continuing occupation of the South.

The Civil Rights Act secured only civil equality, giving the freedpeople access to the legal system and protection from some kinds of discriminatory laws. It did not give them political equality: the right to vote and hold office. Nor did it give them social equality: free and equal access to public venues, from streetcars and railroad cars to theaters and schools. Primary jurisdiction for enforcing civil rights still remained in the state courts. Once state laws were stripped of overt discrimination, de facto discrimination by sheriffs, judges, or ordinary citizens would be hard to prevent under the act.

Johnson vetoed the Freedmen’s Bureau bill. He denounced it as unconstitutional and expensive and as encouraging black “indolence.”

There was method in Johnson’s madness. His goal was a coalition of conservatives who would cross party and sectional boundaries to maintain a white man’s republic.

On April 6, 1866, Congress overrode Johnson’s veto of the Civil Rights Bill. It was the first time in American history that Congress had overridden a presidential veto of a major piece of legislation.

Far from defending the army and its officers, Johnson welcomed the Supreme Court’s ex parte Milligan and Garland decisions in 1866, which indicated limits, as yet unclear, on the reach of martial law, and the Cummings decision in 1867, which ruled the ironclad oath unconstitutional.13

The Republicans had proposed the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution to enshrine the Civil Rights Bill of 1866 in the Constitution itself. They wanted to protect it from the Supreme Court and future congresses, a particular danger since the end of slavery meant the demise of the three-fifths clause, which would add a million and a half people and twenty congressional seats to the South’s total. Unless black people could vote, those seats would probably be overwhelmingly Democratic.

Congress intended the new amendment to extend the guarantees of the Bill of Rights so that they protected citizens against actions by the states as well as by the federal government.

Ultimately the amendment was Lincolnian: it sought, as had Lincoln, to make the sentiments of the Declaration of Independence the guiding light of the republic. It enshrined in the Constitution broad principles of equality, the rights of citizens, and principles of natural rights prominent in the Declaration of Independence and in Republican ideals of free labor and contract freedom.

The definition of the nature of black people was critical to their treatment and the resources allocated to them; those who claimed to be able to identify the supposedly innate qualities of black people would in large measure get to determine their fate. Southern whites had long considered black people not only theirs to own but also theirs to define. This did not change with emancipation. A Virginian who told a northern reporter, “No nigger, free or slave, in these Southern States, nor in any part of the known world, ever would work or ever will work unless he’s made to” voiced the consensus of the South.

Even though in some places, such as Alabama in 1865 and 1866, far more whites drew rations from the bureau than blacks, and even though over the life of the agency roughly a third of all rations went to Southern whites, the bureau’s agents were fixated on black dependency.

During slavery, masters had welcomed black children in the same way they had welcomed colts and calves, as signs of future wealth. But in the postbellum era, unless they could obtain indentures on them through the Black Codes, employers regarded the children who came with their house servants as nuisances. They either refused to take them in at all or pressured

their mothers to send them off to relatives.34

The Freedmen’s Bureau usually allowed a married freedman to make labor contracts covering his wife and children since married freedwomen could not make contracts.

Black people were new citizens, but they were also longtime Americans with typical American habits. Before the Civil War free blacks had begun to organize into voluntary societies, which ranged from churches to fraternal organizations with the usual accouterments of secret signs and rituals. The enthusiasm of antebellum Northern blacks for fraternal organizations had alarmed Douglass, who had denounced them as distractions from the fight against slavery. After the war, however, voluntary associations provided a foundation for political organization.

Accommodationists feared that resistance would make Reconstruction so protracted that the cost to whites would exceed the benefits of any eventual success. No matter whether moderates like former governor Joseph E. Brown of Georgia considered policy, expediency, or self-interest, they all counseled accommodation. Wealthy Southerners still feared Radical plans for confiscation of property would be resurrected unless the South cooperated.

There were two major groups of white Republicans in the South. The first were the so-called scalawags.

The second group of whites who welcomed the black vote was the carpetbaggers

Many organizations arose to terrorize the South, but the Ku Klux Klan became the most notorious. Founded in Tennessee in 1866, the Klan emerged as the armed wing of the Democratic Party. It struck hard in Alabama and harder still in Mississippi. Klan night riding arose easily out of the antebellum slave patrols. Recruits were easy to find in a countryside full of bitter ex-soldiers inured to violence and unreconciled to defeat, but the Klan seems to have recruited largely from the sons of well-to-do slaveholding families who had lost wealth and standing following the war.

Terror quickly jumped from white attempts to suppress black economic independence to efforts to thwart black suffrage and destroy the Union Leagues. White terrorists assassinated Republican leaders in broad daylight.

the Republicans won electoral victories, but these did not always yield the results Radicals and freedmen expected. In Georgia, with the cooperation of Republican moderates, Democrats expelled all the black members from the legislature. They argued, accurately enough, that the law guaranteed blacks the right to vote, but it did not guarantee them the right to hold office.67

Much was at stake: the fate of four million freedpeople, the question of who would govern the South, and the constitutional relationship between the branches of government. What should have been high political drama began as comic opera.

Impeachment went forward because Republican moderates were convinced that a defiant Johnson was illegally subverting the will of Congress and attempting to block the Reconstruction of the South. Southern Unionists, whose political, and sometimes actual, lives rested on the outcome, hated Johnson. Republican anger and frustration initially overcame Republican differences.73 Johnson, as usual, counted on popular support and was, as usual, deluded;