Been in the Storm So Long (115 page)

Despite the grievous loss of Lincoln, then, black spokesmen were almost unanimous in their belief that Providence had chosen “a second Moses” to guide them to “the land of promise.” None other than Andrew Johnson himself made that solemn pledge, in addressing the black people of Nashville: “Humble and unworthy as I am, if no other better shall be found, I will be your Moses, and lead you through the Red Sea of War and Bondage to a fairer future of Liberty and Peace.” The
New Orleans Tribune
, with its own radical notions of reconstruction, thought well enough of the new President to predict that his previously expressed hostility to concentrations of political and economic power in the South presaged a vigorous policy of land confiscation and redistribution. Like Lincoln, Johnson was perceived as a man who exemplified the genius of democratic institutions, having risen from a humble station to the highest office in the land. He had proven his loyalty to the Union, and surely no man who had suffered “the malignity of the Rebels,” as had Johnson, would seek to restore those “traitors” to power. Where Lincoln had equivocated, Johnson could be expected to be decisive. Where Lincoln had been overly magnanimous in his treatment of the ex-Confederates, Johnson, who knew these people far more intimately, would be firm and unyielding.
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The assessment of Johnson’s personality traits proved accurate enough, but blacks had badly misjudged his politics and racial views. In upholding the principles of white supremacy, in expediting the pardon of ex-Confederate leaders, in seeking to restore political and economic power to the old ruling class, President Johnson would act all too decisively. And in opposing even minimal civil rights for blacks, he would be firm and unyielding. For some blacks, the disillusionment came earlier than for most. Even as black newspapers and leaders still voiced their confidence in the new President, field hands forced off the lands of pardoned Rebels suspected that the battle had already been lost. At least, that was the conclusion reached by a white teacher in the Sea Islands, as former masters returned to claim their lands.

For black spokesmen, the President’s decision to pursue a “moderate” reconstruction plan, permitting the white South to reconstruct herself without black participation, prompted an initial disappointment that soon gave way to disbelief. What blacks had viewed (on Johnson’s assurance) as an “experimental” policy, designed to test white loyalty and intentions,
turned into a nightmare of repression, Black Codes, and unequal justice. But rather than give up the “experiment” as a failure, which black leaders had confidently expected, the President insisted that the new state governments be legitimized. And blacks were left to contemplate still again the betrayal of their expectations by a man they had only recently praised so unrestrainedly. “Johnson has sold us,” Frederick Douglass wrote the publisher of the
New Orleans Tribune
in October 1865, but it remained for Congress “to pass upon the bargain.” Two months later, as Congress prepared to convene, the
Tribune
voiced the now deepening black disillusionment with the President’s policies. The editor urged Congress to assume control of reconstruction, to make “no compromises with a conservative and exclusively white-man loving administration,” and to hold the President to his initial commitments. If treason were to be made “infamous,” as Johnson had so often promised, the mode of punishment would have to be severer than the rapidly accumulating stack of executive pardons of former Confederate leaders suggested.
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The President’s response to a delegation of black leaders in February 1866 did little to reassure the few blacks who still retained faith in him. At this none too harmonious exchange of views in the White House, Johnson introduced himself as “a friend of humanity, and especially the friend of the colored man.” He offered once again, if they wished, to serve as their Moses to lead them from bondage to freedom. But he made it clear that he would not lead them to the ballot box, for that would only endanger their freedom and invite race war. Reaffirming his belief in government by consent of the governed, he interpreted that principle to mean that the white people in each state should determine the question of black suffrage. The President pointedly ignored the delegate who asked him if he would apply the principle of majority rule to states like South Carolina, where blacks comprised a majority of the population. Nor did he take kindly to Frederick Douglass’ argument that blacks needed the vote to protect themselves from the already rampant violence which the President thought would be unleashed in the event of black suffrage. As the exchange became increasingly acrimonious, both sides thought it best to terminate the meeting, and Douglass told his fellow delegates: “The President sends us to the people, and we go to the people.” After the “darkey delegation” left, President Johnson reportedly turned to a private secretary and exclaimed, “Those damned sons of bitches thought they had me in a trap! I know that damned Douglass; he’s just like any nigger, and he would sooner cut a white man’s throat than not.” Whether the President actually made that remark, he proceeded to act in its spirit.
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Within months after the White House meeting, the break between the President and black leadership would be complete. James Lynch had acclaimed Andrew Johnson on July 4, 1865, as a firm champion of the African race, but by March 1866 he thought the President was “more to be pitied than feared.” Henry M. Turner was less charitable, deeming the President dangerous as well as pitiful. “I charge Mr. Johnson with the murder of
thousands of our people; for though he does not kill them personally, yet he abets, or gives aid to these murderers, so that it actually amounts to a direct encouragement.” No longer the noble successor to the martyred Lincoln, Johnson now loomed for blacks as the new Jefferson Davis. Presuming to be a second Moses, he acted more like “a very excellent type of Pharaoh.” Pretending to sympathize with the ex-slaves in their new freedom, he vetoed the legislation blacks deemed essential to preserve that freedom. And when he advised the states to reject the Fourteenth Amendment, blacks turned to Congress for an alternative to the callous disregard of human rights that distinguished the occupant of the White House. “The future looks dark,” a black newspaper observed, “and we predict, that we are entering upon the greatest political contest that has ever agitated the people of the country—a contest, in which, we of the South must be for the most part spectators; not indifferent spectators, for it is about us that the political battle is fought. The issue is fairly joined.”
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W
ITH THE ISSUE
“fairly joined,” the same urgency that prompted black leaders to look to Congress for relief also moved equal suffrage to the forefront of their demands. The initial hesitation to press that issue, as at the Freedmen’s Convention in North Carolina in 1865, proved short-lived, particularly after the conciliatory appeals to the constitutional conventions and state legislatures had yielded only oppressive Black Codes and not even a hint of future political participation. For black leadership, the suffrage issue quickly assumed a significance that rivaled the emotional investment tens of thousands of black laborers had made in the idea of “forty acres and a mule.” Both suffrage and land came to be regarded, albeit with sharply contrasting emphases by different classes of the black population, as indispensable to freedom. Only by winning the vote, black leaders told their people, would the other aspirations they cherished have a chance for fulfillment. “The only salvation for us besides the power of the Government,” Virginia freedmen declared, “is in the
possession of the ballot
. Give us this, and we will protect ourselves.”
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Political realism and the middle-class economic outlook of black leadership helped to determine the ordering of priorities. Predictably, then, the suffrage issue, not “forty acres and a mule,” came to dominate the black conventions, newspapers, and oratory. While the demand for land raised the ugly specter of confiscation and the abrogation of the rights of property, the demand for the vote simply reaffirmed traditional American principles of equal opportunity, fair play, and government by the consent of the governed. To make this absolutely clear, black spokesmen invoked on every possible occasion the revolutionary traditions of the American nation and appealed to whites on the basis of their most cherished freedoms. If taxed
to support national and state government, blacks demanded the right to participate in choosing the men who imposed and spent the taxes. If subjected to the laws of the land, blacks demanded a voice in selecting those who would make and administer the laws. “I tell you, sah,” a North Carolina freedman explained to a northern visitor, “we ain’t noways safe, ’long as dem people makes de laws we’s got to be governed by. We’s got to hab a voice in de ’pintin’ of de law-makers. Den we knows our frens, and whose hans we’s safe in.” Few white Americans could quarrel with those sentiments without violating their own history and traditions. But if they did, blacks grounded their demand for suffrage on an even more direct appeal to the patriotic instincts of the American people.
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If blacks could be trusted with the musket, they could be trusted with the ballot, and the nation owed at least as much to those who had helped to defend it as to those who had tried to destroy it. Their claims to the suffrage, blacks maintained, had already been validated by the martyrdom of Crispus Attucks in the American Revolution, by the valor of black soldiers at the Battle of New Orleans in 1812 and most recently on the battlefields of the Civil War. This patriotic appeal was made frequently, if only because it seemed calculated to win sympathy in the North, where black leaders were now certain the final decision would be made. At the same time, blacks pressed their case on the basis of whites already permitted to vote. If men who had fought against the government could vote, why not loyal Americans who had remained steadfast in their support of the government? If “the very poorest and meanest of white men” and foreign immigrants barely acculturated to American values and principles (such as the “lowly” Irish) could be trusted to exercise the franchise, why not blacks whose roots were as deep as those of any American, including the President himself?
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By citing the admission of immigrants to political privileges, black leaders sought to make two important points. The case of the Irish suggested to them that wealth and literacy were not considered valid criteria for depriving any person of the suffrage. The fact that distinct ethnic groups like the Jews voted without restriction further suggested that political equality need not lead to social mixing, as some whites feared. “They enjoy all the privileges that any white American enjoys in this country,” a black newspaper said of the Jews, but “there is not as much social commingling between the Jew and the white American as between the white American and the black man.” In the view of the
Colored American
, a black newspaper in Augusta, Georgia, only three classes of the population could be properly deprived of the right to vote: foreigners, children, and women, whose “sphere is anywhere but in the arena of politics and government.”
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Although some black leaders were less dogmatic on the question of extending the vote to women, the issue was seldom raised lest it confuse and undermine the more urgent cause of black suffrage.

In petitioning the Constitutional Convention for suffrage rights, a black meeting in Charleston, South Carolina, frankly admitted the “deplorable
ignorance” of the majority of their people. Nor did they expect “the ignorant” to be admitted to the exercise of privileges “which they might use to the injury of the State.” While conceding this point, however, blacks in Charleston and elsewhere insisted that ignorance was not a deficiency peculiar to Afro-Americans but characterized large numbers of whites—North and South. If “the ignorant” were to be deprived of the vote, then, consistency demanded the disfranchisement of tens of thousands of whites. If, on the other hand, ignorant whites voted without undermining American institutions, ignorant blacks could be trusted as well. Although preferring universal manhood suffrage, black leaders were willing to accept educational and property tests, but only if they were applied honestly and equally to both races.
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That would immediately enfranchise literate and propertied blacks, while encouraging others to emulate them. In the 1890s, black leaders would advance a similar proposal as a way of forestalling total disfranchisement. But whether in the 1860s or in the 1890s, black support for conditional suffrage rested on the false assumption that their white opponents objected only to ignorant and poor blacks voting and on the naïve belief that whites would disfranchise some of their own people. Actually, most black leaders knew better and suggested conditional suffrage only as a way of unveiling white hypocrisy and obtaining full suffrage. “Is a white voter required to know how to read and write?” a black newspaper asked. “To be a moral, a religious or a temperance man? Not in the least.… He enjoys his political rights simply because he is a man and a citizen.” The black man asked for no less than that.
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