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November 3 - November 3, 2020
The movement of black refugees into the cities both during the war and after increased racial tensions and produced new waves of violence. In Memphis clashes between mustered-out black soldiers and the largely Irish police led to a confrontation on May 1, 1866, in which two policeman were shot. The police, supplemented by largely Irish mobs, descended on South Memphis, first singling out black men in uniform—current or discharged soldiers—and then killing blacks indiscriminately. In ensuing days the rioting spread back into Memphis proper.
A little over two months later, violence ripped through New Orleans. Ex-Confederates had won the 1866 local elections in which blacks could not vote. Louisiana Radicals called a convention in New Orleans with the goal of enfranchising blacks and disenfranchising “rebels.” The New Orleans police force, consisting largely of Confederate veterans, plotted to break up the convention. On July 30 the police and a white mob attacked a march of twenty-five convention delegates and two hundred supporters, mostly black veterans. The police and white mob were well armed; the Radicals were not.
By the time federal troops drove off the police, thirty-seven people, all Radicals and thirty-four of them black, were dead. Johnson would defend the New Orleans authorities and blame the riot on the Radicals.
Southern governments created under Presidential Reconstruction seemed little more than progeny of the Confederacy and children even more brutal than their parent.
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.
The Southern violence that helped Republicans sell the Fourteenth Amendment undercut Johnson’s attempts to legitimize the new Southern governments and to form a coalition to counter the Radical and moderate Republicans.
Despite the failure of the convention, Johnson decided to stake his political future on the congressional elections of 1866. He would campaign against the Radicals.26 At the heart of Johnson’s fall campaign was his bitter opposition to the Fourteenth Amendment. He pushed hard to restore power to the South before it could be ratified and take effect.
In the immediate wake of the war, black people starved, sickened, and suffered horrific violence—and tens of thousands died. Southern whites and many Northerners did not consider this primarily a result of Southern persecution or failures of Northern policy. It was a result of the nature of black people, who were not capable of taking care of themselves once free.28
To a greater degree than later Americans appreciate, they thought in terms of collectivities rather than individuals. They imagined their society as consisting of families, congregations, the wide array of voluntary organizations who had massed for Lincoln’s funeral processions. They gauged the success of an economy, and a life, more by its ability to produce homes than its ability to produce wealth. Americans gendered the home as a female space, but they also defined manhood around a very simple test: the ability to maintain and protect a family home.
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.
It is hard to think of sharecropping and tenancy as a triumph, but in the first years of Reconstruction, as planters first refused to acknowledge the end of slavery and then resorted to violence to coerce freedpeople back into gang labor, they were victories of a sort.
What was developing in the South was a coercive labor system, which although not slavery, was not free labor either. It depended on extralegal violence, coercive laws, burdensome debt relations, and the use of convict labor to limit alternatives.
To defeat the Radicals and ensure the rejection of the Fourteenth Amendment, Johnson made a “swing around the circle,” traveling from the East through the Midwest. He ended up delighting his enemies and appalling many of his supporters. With each stop, the crowds became more hostile, and Johnson grew angrier. He argued with hecklers, compared himself to the crucified Christ, and found himself abused in the press.
The Republicans carried the country north of the Mason Dixon line, increasing both their majority in Congress and the number of Radicals in their ranks. They rightly considered themselves “masters of the situation.” If they stuck together, they could override the president on any legislation that he vetoed.41
The Republicans required Southern ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment if Confederate states were to be considered for readmission to the Union. Only Tennessee accepted these terms and reentered the Union in 1866.
The Republicans of the new Fortieth Congress responded by retreating to their caucus to work out their divisions before a bill came to the floor. When they succeeded, their two-thirds majority allowed them to reduce the president of the United States to little more than a legislative nuisance. But governing involved more than legislating. Johnson still retained his power as commander-in-chief, and the army was critical to the plans Congress contemplated for reconstructing the South.
Bitter and angry, Johnson moved increasingly closer to the old Southern leadership that he had spent his career opposing. He continued to replace Freedmen’s Bureau officials who had Radical sympathies with conservative Southerners.
It divided the Confederate South, except Tennessee, into five military districts. The army was to protect freedpeople and Unionists from attacks on their lives and property and to supervise the calling of the state constitutional conventions.
some ways, the original Reconstruction Act was the high-water mark of Republican Radicalism and demonstrated the limits of power based on legislation alone. At least on paper, Congress had dramatically enlarged federal power and black rights. In December 1866 only about 0.5 percent of black adult males could vote. In December 1867 the figure rose to 80.5 percent, with the entire increase coming in the old Confederacy. This was sufficient for a group of Republicans, some of them Radicals, who were willing to move toward peace and the readmission of the Confederate states.
There were two major groups of white Republicans in the South. The first were the so-called scalawags. Most had opposed secession, even if they later fought for the Confederacy. Others had remained Unionists during the Civil War. They had been thickest in the hill and mountain counties of the Appalachians, particularly in Alabama, Tennessee, and West Virginia, which had seceded from Virginia and become a new state. The Alabama hill country, like the border states, had seen a civil war within the Civil War as Unionists and Confederates fought and killed one other.
The second group of whites who welcomed the black vote was the carpetbaggers (a term that seems not to have gained currency until 1868): Northerners who had moved to the South either as soldiers or seekers of opportunity in the wake of the war.
Most critically, their economic interests differed considerably. The scalawags wanted debt relief and low taxes. The usual form of debt relief—homestead protection and stay laws—prevented the seizure of land by creditors or tax collectors for debts incurred before 1865. Debt relief, however, would also aid the scalawags’ enemies, the rich and heavily indebted planters, while hurting the black rural poor.
Carpetbaggers and scalawags also often opposed each other. Carpetbaggers objected to debt relief because they feared that it would scare off the capital on which development depended. They also wanted state subsidies for infrastructure, particularly railroads. Scalawags, in turn, were skeptical of plans for railroad subsidies because they would raise taxes.
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.
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.64
White terrorists assassinated Republican leaders in broad daylight. During October 1866 estimates put the number of black people murdered in Caddo Parish, Louisiana, at forty-two. In Bossier Parish a Negro hunt resulted in the murder of at least 162 freedpeople. Ironically, the success of freedpeople in escaping gang labor made them more vulnerable to the Klan.
Terror created a political dilemma for the Republicans. Violence often accompanied American elections. Private militia companies paraded to the polls and partisans brawled. Parties hired thugs to intimidate the opposition. But until Reconstruction, violence did not lead to soldiers intervening in elections.
Johnson’s struggle against the Radicals precipitated serious Republican attempts to remove the president from office. The drive for impeachment sprang from Johnson’s contest with Edwin Stanton, but it was hard to separate the accusations against Johnson, which were important, from the larger political context. Impeaching Johnson would install a new president and would influence the upcoming 1868 election. Because the country lacked a vice president following the assassination of Lincoln, the 1792 law governing presidential succession would make Sen. Benjamin Wade, as president pro tempore of
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Chief Justice Salmon Chase, who would preside over the trial in the Senate, was also from Ohio, and he too wanted to be president. He, too, hated Wade. Wade, for his part, rightly saw Grant as his rival for the Republican nomination, and knew that unless something dramatic happened—such as Johnson’s removal from office and Wade’s ascension to the presidency—Grant was almost certainly going to be the nominee. Virtually every major politician involved in the trial thus had issues other than Andrew Johnson’s innocence or guilt on his mind.
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. Stanton barricaded himself in his office. His furious wife, tiring of the turmoil, urged him to resign and refused to send him the linens and food he requested.
William Tecumseh Sherman joked that he had less protection when traveling through Indian country than Stanton had in the heavily garrisoned War Department.
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.
Chase, who had moved from Radicalism into the Democratic Party in a vain quest for the presidency, did not get the nomination. He died in 1873.
The Fourteenth Amendment disenfranchised only the Southern elite who had violated oaths of office. Many of the new Southern constitutions granted suffrage to all eligible ex-Confederates. Georgia, North Carolina, and Florida had no clauses disenfranchising ex-Confederates in their constitutions, and Louisiana had only a nominal one. The vast majority of ex-Confederates could vote.
The election of 1868 in the South was one of the most violent in American history. When white terrorists expanded their attacks from recalcitrant black laborers to black voters, the increase in black self-defense organizations spawned rumors among whites of black aggression. Many white Southerners justified their own violence as preemptive and defensive.
Terrorism also helped carry Louisiana for the Democrats. Armed whites in St. Landry Parish killed as many as 200 blacks in the course of the campaign. The army general in charge refused to intervene, instead warning blacks to stay away from the polls.
They felt betrayed by Wendell Phillips, whose conviction that this was the black man’s hour and that women’s suffrage was impossible in the present generation, denied them access to funds to campaign for universal suffrage. They thought women’s suffrage a real possibility.
But he also argued that the case for black suffrage was more urgent than women’s suffrage. “When women, because they are women, are hunted down through the cities of New York and New Orleans; when they are dragged from their houses and hung upon lamp-posts; when their children are torn from their arms, and their brains dashed out upon the pavement; when they are objects of insult and outrage at every turn … then they will have an urgency to obtain the ballot equal to our own.” Many other advocates of women’s suffrage, male and female, took a similar position.
It was not Democrats but Republicans in Congress who began to restrict black suffrage rights. In 1871 Congress stripped Washington of its right to self-government, making it a federal territory with the chief officials appointed by Congress. Henry Cooke, Jay Cooke’s brother, became governor and began a period of elite rule and limits on democratic governance in the name of economic progress.
Endowed with federal subsidies, railroads would build in advance of actual settlement. Soldiers, who appeared nowhere on Gast’s canvas, would protect them, and the railroads, along with the federal government, would induce settlers to follow.
War erupted because Americans threatened resources critical to the survival of Plains tribes. As the army reorganized and withdrew from the South, it deployed into the West, creating new posts, most of them small, isolated, and designed to protect the very travelers and railroad construction crews who precipitated conflict.
Yet in practice the Peace Commission and the peace policy that followed sought the same ends as army officers who urged violent solutions: the cession of Indian lands, the confinement of Indian peoples to reservations, and their transformation into monogamous Christians who would live like surrounding whites. Outside of California, parts of Oregon, Nevada, and Arizona, this was a program of coerced assimilation rather than extermination.
Ex-Confederates insisted they were provoked, and they listed the provocations: “putting on airs,” “sassiness,” “impudence,” “insolence,” and “disrespect.”18 The relentless violence against freedpeople outraged Sheridan, who was a dangerous man to antagonize. Throckmorton opposed the pending Fourteenth Amendment and thought the Texas legislature should have the opportunity to reject the Thirteenth, which was the product of “a parcel of experimenting, humbugging, rascally, fanatical hounds of hell who have served the devil all their lives.” He predictably refused to protect Unionists and
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Although the Union Army stationed more troops in Texas than in any other Confederate state, they were insufficient to cover all needs. Sheridan had to choose between applying force to protect citizens—freedpeople and Southern Unionists—or to conquer Indians who were resisting invasion from ex-Confederates. He preferred to protect freedpeople and white Unionists.
Reconstruction in the West involved the same paradox as in the South: the expansion of individualism and contract freedom—hallmarks of a liberalism ideologically opposed to strong governments—under the sponsorship of a newly powerful state.
Acting as an imperial state against semisovereign tribes, it forced the cession of Indian lands and redistributed them to both individuals and corporations, in effect instituting the land redistribution that was rejected in the South. Congress voted direct federal subsidies to corporations, something they largely refused to do in the South. The army attacked and disciplined noncitizen Indians in ways the government never attempted with citizen Southerners after the Civil War.
African Americans, immigrants—mostly Germans and Irish—and the poor supplied most of the army’s manpower, and they had virtually no chance of advancing into the officer corps.
After 1869, black soldiers, serving under white officers, made up about 10 percent of the regular army, and black cavalry about 20 percent of its mounted force.
Soldiers were poor when they entered and poor when they left, which was why so many deserters stole and then sold their equipment. Officers were quite literally officers and gentlemen, and the government paid them and granted them privileges that allowed them to live as gentlemen.
Soldiers received little military training and were notoriously bad shots. They were laborers in uniform—building forts, improving roads, and repairing buildings. Their own barracks were vile, and if they had families, the living quarters around the posts as late as the 1890s were described by the surgeon general as “wretched” and “a disgrace.”
