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

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.

Johnson had argued for the redistribution of plantations to whites. The forty acres and a mule that freedmen hoped for meant that independent black farmers would compete with small white farmers. Ordinary Southern whites saw their status threatened. It was hard for them to see white independence as not depending on black subordination.

By signing contracts black people would prove that they “deserved” freedom.59 Such language was revealing. Howard imagined the Freedmen’s Bureau as part of a larger effort to regenerate the nation. Like many Protestants of the period, he had partially secularized the old Protestant notion of rebirth. Ideas of rebirth and regeneration virtually always required suffering, and this was the prescription for freedmen.

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. Bureau agents were right in thinking that the mere fact of a contract forced the white employer to recognize the black employee as his legal equal, but this triumph was purely nominal and yielded only marginal benefits to black laborers. At their extreme, contracts were little more than slavery under another name.

Contracts could replicate conditions that the freedmen thought emancipation had ended forever. In many areas of the South contracts ran for a year. The freedmen agreed to labor “for their rations and clothing in the usual way,” which is to say the same way as they labored under slavery. Many often received very little beyond this.

Just as American Indian peoples would later complain of the fraud and injustice of the Bureau of Indian Affairs while nonetheless seeing it as a necessary line of defense against even more rapacious whites, so most freedmen, with all their justified criticisms of the Freedmen’s Bureau, saw it as necessary protection against white Southerners.

What white Southerners would do to the freedmen if left unrestrained became clear as Presidential Reconstruction proceeded in the summer and fall of 1865 and Johnson’s hope that the “plain people” of the South would reject the old planter elite were dashed. Ironically, Johnson himself now became an agent of the elite’s return.

Schurz reported that some Southerners found the loyalty oath repugnant and humiliating and refused to take it, but for others it was merely instrumental. It gave them back their votes and potentially their power. They treated it with scorn and ridicule, but they took it. Johnson initially denied pardons to the highest-ranking Confederates; they had to apply for personal pardons. Petitioning for pardons became women’s work, and it was both personal and tawdry.

The president issued seven thousand pardons by 1866. Southerners saw in amnesty, the pardons, and the denial of votes to blacks Johnson’s intention to promote “a white man’s government,” with control over suffrage vested in the states.70 Johnson seems to have thought that pardoning leading Confederates would make them both grateful to him and dependent on him, but he soon learned that the opposite was true.

Or, as a white Mississippian put it, “Our negroes have … a tall fall ahead of them. They will learn that freedom and independence are different things.”71

The violence went beyond that. Once freedpeople ceased to have value as property, Schurz wrote, the maiming and killing of colored men seems to be looked upon by many as one of those venial offences which must be forgiven to the outraged feelings of a wronged and robbed people.

Mississippi petulantly refused to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, outlawing slavery. It did so only in 1995, 130 years after enough states had ratified it for it to take effect. Johnson had added to his requirements that the states repudiate their Confederate war debts, yet both Mississippi and South Carolina refused to do so.

If the North could compel white paupers to work, why couldn’t the South compel black paupers to work? If vagrants could be compelled to work, then the next step was to make virtually all black people vagrants and paupers under the law. In the North the new industrial economy would generate vagrants and paupers, but Southern legislatures in 1865 sought to manufacture them by legislation.

most freedmen had no easy access to cash. The black codes were designed to make sure that lack of cash became a legally punishable offense, and they ensured that agricultural labor and domestic service were the only ways for African Americans to get cash.

Mississippi defined “vagrant” so broadly that those who neglected their calling, did not support themselves or their families, or failed to pay annual poll taxes were all vagrants. In Alabama “any runaway, stubborn servant or child,” any worker “who loiters away his time,” or failed to comply with a labor contract was deemed a vagrant. The laws themselves thus produced vagrants, who could be punished by being forced to labor.

Southern whites could escape the Freedmen’s Bureau’s supervision of contracts by turning to Southern courts to enforce their own contracts with black workers. They also made agreements among themselves not to compete for laborers and not to rent or sell lands to black people. If all else failed, there was always violence. A barrage of beatings, whippings, mutilations, rapes, and murders of freedpeople by whites accompanied the black codes.

Until Congress was called to session in December 1865, the Republicans could do little about Johnson’s policies, and they were hardly united about what they should do when they returned. They had achieved much during the Civil War. With Southerners gone and the remaining Democrats in a minority, Republicans had passed an ambitious program of national improvements to create small farms, build a modern railroad infrastructure, and fund universities.

The Civil War had undercut antebellum arguments for states’ rights, which had become tainted, a code not for restraint and limited government but for slavery and oppression. Homogeneous citizenship formed the foundation of the Radical vision of Reconstruction. In practice it came to mean full civil, political, and social equality for freedpeople and confiscation and redistribution of land in the South.

Intellectually and ideologically, those committed to the full Radical program never constituted a majority of the party’s representatives, but the Radicals formed the most influential wing of the Republican Party. The party’s most powerful figures—Charles Sumner in the Senate and Thaddeus Stevens in the House—were Radicals who looked beyond the restoration of the old Union and sought to create a new nation from the ruins of the old.

Republican programs for the South and West were of a piece, and they were a variant of a larger pattern of state building in Italy, Germany, Mexico, Argentina, Japan, and elsewhere.90 But broad common goals did not resolve underlying tensions between liberals and other Radicals.

Liberalism had arisen in opposition to European aristocracy, monarchy, and established churches, particularly the Catholic Church. Liberals easily accepted the idea of a homogeneous citizenry since they conceived of society as a collection of autonomous rights-bearing individuals rather than an assemblage of classes, ethnic groups, or other collectivities. They made the contract between buyer and seller the template for all social relations.

Orthodox liberals embraced a laissez-faire economy, something other Radicals either paid lip service to or ignored, and a minimal government that was incompatible with Radical ambitions. Although liberals in Europe and the United States acknowledged the need for state intervention at numerous levels, they thought that economic well-being should be left largely to markets, which they equated with freedom and regarded as natural.

Yet paradoxically for a group that arose in reaction to an established and entrenched European order, liberals were also fearful of a freedom that manifested itself in the popular movements, popular religion, and popular culture that flourished in the wake of war. Liberals tended to be ensconced in the elite institutions of American society.

Liberalism and Radical Republicanism were ideologies—simplified and idealized versions of how society should operate—and not descriptions of the far more complicated ways the North did operate. Northerners, in general, were both decidedly less liberal than doctrinaire liberals desired and less Radical than ardent Radicals wished.

There were two intertwined threads of American thinking about freedom, rights, and equality. The brightly colored thread naturalized rights and made them universal: “all men are created equal.” The second, more inconspicuous but also arguably more powerful, thread localized rights.

Local governance consisted of a collective order of duties and privileges rather than universal rights. As long as citizenship remained local, as it always had been in the United States, citizens were manifestly unequal.94 Americans endowed their local governments with remarkable powers. Such governments in the United States had long regulated “public safety, public economy, public mobility, public morality, and public health.” They controlled whom people could marry, what they could print, and what they could send through the mail. They regulated how citizens conducted their businesses, how they built their houses, what they could do in them, and how they managed their livestock. They determined where, and if, people could carry firearms and where and with whom their children went to school. Local governments intervened constantly in daily life.

The ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment threatened to dissolve the Republican consensus. With slavery abolished, the most ardent liberals among the Radicals thought their work largely done.

In between the Radicals and the Conservatives, and holding the balance of power were the moderate Republicans. For them restoring the Union often took priority over securing the rights of the freedpeople.

By the end of 1865, as Congress prepared to return to Washington, it seemed that Johnson’s policies were squandering the fruits of victory and rewarding the actions of traitors.

Racism, like other beliefs, came in degrees. Many Radicals and most Republicans were racist; it would have been astonishing had they not been.

Johnson was also a racist, but his racism was extreme. Johnson had what his private secretary described as “a morbid distress and feeling against the negroes.” In this he reflected his Tennessee Unionist supporters.

In a discourse of white victimization common in the late nineteenth century, Johnson thought poor whites rather than blacks the real victims of slavery.

Giving African Americans the franchise thus seemed to him antithetical to his ambition of ensuring that the Southern “plain folks”—the whites with whom Johnson sympathized most deeply—dominated the postbellum South.

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.

The status quo, however, was rapidly changing, and the man pushing the change most aggressively and rapidly was Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania. Stevens came to consider Andrew Johnson “at heart a damn scoundrel,” and when Congress came into session in December 1865, Stevens’s opinions mattered.

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. Those reformers who saw the inequities of gender and class most clearly, however, were, in turn, often aggressively racist in anchoring reform in the defense of white manhood and the white home. There was also an undeniable smugness in the Radicals’ assumption that blacks, Southern whites, Indians, and poor Northerners all needed to turn themselves into replicas of successful and independent Northern white men. Still, Stevens’s position was a brave and remarkable one in 1865.

In December 1865, Congress faced the immediate practical question of whether to seat the newly elected Southern representatives arriving in Washington. If Congress seated the Southern delegations, the war power would come to an end once civil government was restored in all states. Southern Democrats, their representation increased by the abolition of slavery and with it the end of the three-fifths clause, would, in combination with Democrats from the North, threaten Republican dominance.

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.

Sumner asserted that without equality of citizens before the law and full consent of the governed, a government could not be considered republican. It defined a standard that the North no more met than the South.

The second proposal was the Civil Rights Bill of 1866, which passed the Senate in early February. It gave teeth to the Thirteenth Amendment and represented a breathtaking extension of federal power.

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.

As was the custom, on Washington’s Birthday a crowd gathered before the White House to serenade the president, and Johnson gave an impromptu speech that provided more evidence that he should never give impromptu speeches. He equated Stevens, Sumner, and the abolitionist Wendell Phillips with the Confederate leadership. They were, he said, as bad as traitors since they too aimed to undermine the Constitution. The president referred to himself 210 times in a speech of little more than an hour, or three times every minute.

he was worse in private. A former slave owner, he rebuffed and insulted a black delegation headed by Frederick Douglass. Johnson told the delegation that it was poor whites, not blacks, who were the real victims of slavery in the South. After the delegates left, he told his private secretary: “Those damned sons of bitches thought they had me in a trap. I know that damned Douglass; he’s just like any nigger, & he would sooner cut a white man’s throat than not.”

On March 27, Johnson vetoed the Civil Rights Bill as an attack on the rights of white people and as a move to centralize all power in the federal government. He began his veto message with the denunciation of a country that would protect “the Chinese of the Pacific States, Indians subject to taxation, the people called Gipsies, as well as the entire race designated as blacks, people of color, negroes, mulattoes and persons of African blood.” This was the “mongrel republic” of Democratic nightmares.

Indiana Republican Oliver P. Morton, however, went straight to the weakness of Johnson’s strategy. The battle remained what it had been all along: a choice between loyalty and treason,

And this party … proclaims to an astonished world that the only effect of vanquishing armed rebels in the field is to return them to seats in Congress, and to restore them to political power. Having failed to destroy the constitution by force, they seek to do it by construction, with … the remarkable discovery that the rebels who fought to destroy the constitution were its true friends, and that the men who shed their blood and gave their substance to preserve it were its only enemies. Morton was not a Radical; he was a leader of Indiana’s conservative Republicans.

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.

The demobilization of the army gave unreconciled Confederates freedom and confidence. With one hand, the government had passed new laws and assumed new powers; with the other, it had eliminated much of its ability to enforce them. Efforts to create black independence faltered not only because of the conviction of some bureau agents that black people were by nature dependent but also because those who sought to protect black rights often lacked the means to do so outside of the cities and towns.

The bureau was typical of the federal government’s administrative apparatus in the wake of the Civil War. On paper, it was powerful, with a sweeping mandate and the legal means to enforce it. On the ground, it was understaffed, underfinanced, and incapable of achieving its goals.

Without troops to overawe them, guerrillas and outlaws became more aggressive. In rural areas across the Deep South the withdrawal of troops was the prelude to violence and chaos. Southerners burned churches, shot isolated soldiers, and killed hundreds of freedpeople.