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The triumphant North demanded three things of the defeated South: acknowledgment of the emancipation of its slaves; contract freedom for all citizens, black and white; and national reunification.
This struggle over the results and meaning of the Civil War—and the meaning of black freedom—would be fought throughout the rest of the century in all sections of the country, but it began in 1865 in the South with Reconstruction.
The foundations of black freedom had been laid in the contraband camps and the Union Army during the Civil War.
In the contraband camps and army the freedpeople had exchanged useful service for rights and protection and by doing so breached what had once seemed an impenetrable barrier between black people and the possibility of citizenship.
Stowe had popularized the term “white trash” to Northern audiences in her A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which she had published to demonstrate the factual basis of her best-selling novel. Slavery, Stowe had written, had produced “a poor white population as degraded and brutal as ever existed in the most crowded districts of Europe.” Even when these whites had gained enough wealth to own slaves, the slaves were “in every respect, superior to their owners.”
Congress was in recess in the spring of 1865 when the Confederacy collapsed following Lee’s surrender, Lincoln’s assassination, the gradual surrender of the other Southern armies, and the capture on May 10 of Jefferson Davis. It was left to a new president—and his cabinet, the army, and Southerners, both black and white—to determine the fate of the South.
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.
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.
The North had achieved only the “negative part” of emancipation, ending the system of chattel slavery; the hard part, instituting a system of free labor, remained to be done.
The old Southern elite thought of themselves as victims.
Above all, whites dreaded vengeance from their own ex-slaves. White Southerners had always wavered between contentions that their slaves were treated with kindness and considered part of the slaveholder’s family and a fear of seething collective black anger and individual grievances that had to be restrained by force lest they erupt in vengeance and retaliation. With emancipation, all their latent fears of retaliatory violence against a system sustained by the lash and gun haunted them.
But as Schurz reported in 1865, and the slaveholders themselves admitted, “the transition of the southern negro from slavery to freedom was untarnished by any deeds of blood, and the apprehension [of African American violence] … proved utterly groundless.”
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.
In April the Union Army held some eighty towns and cities, but elsewhere the armies had either passed through leaving devastation in their wake or never appeared. Occupying the South meant controlling an area the size of Western Europe, roughly eight hundred counties, spread over 750,000 square miles, and containing nine million people.
neither the high command nor the officers and men had much of a stomach for a long occupation of the South. With the war won, the soldiers in the volunteer units—the vast bulk of the army—were ready to muster out, and most officers wanted no part of occupation.
The number of Union soldiers in the Confederacy fell from roughly 1 million in April to 125,000 by November and 90,000 by the end of January 1866.
On May 29, 1865, President Johnson issued his first two Reconstruction proclamations. They created the road map—vague as it was in its particulars—for Reconstruction and the return of civil government in the South. The first proclamation, issued under the constitutional power of the president to grant pardons, gave amnesty to most ex-Confederates on their taking an oath of loyalty to the United States and accepting the end of slavery.
The second, issued under his wartime powers as commander-in-chief, 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.
Even as Johnson maintained war powers to govern the South, he alienated the Radical Republicans, who read conditions in the South more accurately than Johnson.
To Johnson’s dismay, Southern sheriffs and posses would try to arrest and imprison Northern soldiers.
The South might have rebelled, and that rebellion might have been crushed, but the president and Congress, by Johnson’s logic, had no more authority over the South when the war ended than when it had begun.
Legally, few or none of the new Southern governors he appointed were eligible for office. Congress had in 1862 demanded that all federal officials swear to the so-called ironclad oath, that they were now and had always been loyal to the United States. Versions of this oath were required for congressmen and embedded in the new constitutions of Tennessee, Missouri, and Maryland. Amnesty did not do away with the requirement, but Johnson chose to ignore the law.
Johnson substituted an oath specifying only future loyalty to the United States.
The president’s authority came from his war powers. When disorder and violence continued after the surrender of Confederate armies, war powers and martial law remained in force. Neither Johnson nor the Republican Congress considered the mere defeat of Confederate armies to constitute peace.
With the collapse of the Confederacy, the army ruled the South as a conquered territory under martial law, and military responsibilities kept increasing. The army acted as a relief agency, a police force, a court, a public works bureau, and a school system. Although Johnson’s proclamations restored limited civil government in the South, they did not end martial law, which persisted for all of 1865 and much of 1866.
By Howard’s own estimation, however, the government had confiscated 0.002 percent of land in the South, and so only a fraction of freedpeople could have obtained farms without much greater confiscation.53
On July 28, 1865, Howard issued Circular 13, ordering the assistant commissioners to divide the confiscated and abandoned lands under federal control into forty-acre plots for lease to freedmen, who were to have three years to purchase the land at its 1860 value. Future pardons by the president would not affect the status of abandoned or confiscated property. The circular attracted opposition beyond the South, and the key opponent was Johnson.57 Within a month, Johnson overturned the order.
It would take until the next year for the freedmen’s hopes for redistribution to die. Howard floated a much smaller plan that Johnson also rejected.
Thaddeus Stevens would attempt to resurrect the issue by advocating the confiscation of the lands of all Confederates worth $10,000 or more for redistribution. This would provide enough land for the freedmen but leave the lands of 90 percent of the residents of the South untouched. But in renewing the bureau in July 16, 1866, Congress validated the restoration of lands to white Southerners in the Sherman Reservation, the belt of abandoned plantations in the Georgia Sea Islands and coast that Gen. Sherman had turned over to freedmen.
the Freedmen’s Bureau put enormous pressure on the freedmen to enter into contracts.
The bureau hoped to supervise all contracts, but white Southerners often had the contracts executed before a local magistrate. Given the discrepancy in the power and status of those making the contracts, the illiteracy of many ex-slaves, and white Southerners’ resort to violence and coercion, the possibilities of abuse were manifold.
Politically, Johnson used the presence of the army 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.
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.
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. They gave employers near absolute control of their laborers during the hours of labor (which South Carolina defined as from sunrise to sunset) and when they were not working. Employers retained the right of physically punishing their workers and docking their pay. In
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Southern lawmakers contended that in passing vagrancy laws they did nothing that the North had not already done, and that in aiming them at the freedmen they only compelled them to work as the Freedmen’s Bureau itself did.
vagrants could be compelled to work, then the next step was to make virtually all black people vagrants and paupers under the law.
What vagrancy laws did to adults, apprenticeship laws did to children.
Southern courts sundered black families as effectively as the slave trade by assigning black children, without their or their parents’ consent, to white employers.
Johnson may have sympathized with the racism that inspired the black codes, but he did not endorse the codes. He did, however, accept the new government’s legitimacy without granting them full authority. The military remained in place and martial law remained in force. These were the ambiguities of Presidential Reconstruction in practice.
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. The core support of the Radicals lay in New England and areas settled by New Englanders, although other areas could also produce Radicals.
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 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.
Other Radicals, like white Southerners, were less blind to the realities of the freedpeople’s condition. Contract freedom had, after all, triumphed over slavery only through the armed power of the federal government. Stevens and Sumner recognized that people experienced freedom only under the protection of the government’s police power.
thanks to Andrew Johnson and the Southerners who eventually supported him, many liberals did not desert Radicalism easily or quickly. The Black Codes did not look like either free labor or contract freedom.
Many Radicals and most Republicans were racist; it would have been astonishing had they not been. Most Northerners in 1865 initially proved unwilling to move beyond granting civil liberties to black people. They balked at granting them political freedom—suffrage and the right to hold office—let alone social equality.
In the fall of 1865 proposals to extend the vote to black men went down to defeat in Connecticut, Wisconsin, and Minnesota.
The status quo, however, was rapidly changing, and the man pushing the change most aggressively and rapidly was Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania.
The doctrine of a “white man’s government” was a sibling of deceased Chief Justice Roger Taney’s ruling in the Dred Scott decision
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.
