Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction (71 page)

Not every battle for equality ended so happily. Free Northern blacks could achieve the victories they won because they operated in a largely urban context, where many of them had already established visible places in Northern society and where white allies were fairly close at hand. Even then, only Massachusetts enacted significant bans on segregation in hotels, restaurants, and theaters. Among the newly emancipated freedpeople of the South, the story was bleaker. Lacking education, property, or even a clear sense of what emancipation might mean, slaves slipped away to the Union armies or celebrated their liberation as the Union forces marched southward past them, even as they had no certainty what the next step might be. A Federal officer marching down toward Murfreesboro wrote that “at every plantation negroes
came flocking to the roadside to see us. … They have heard of the abolition army, the music, the banners, the glittering arms… [and they] welcome us with extravagant manifestations of joy. They keep time to the music with feet and hands and hurrah ‘fur de ole flag and de Union,’ sometimes following us for miles.” An estimated ten thousand liberated slaves packed up and trailed after William Tecumseh Sherman and his army in 1864, shouting, “Yesterday I was a slave, to day I am free. We are all white now.” However, they quickly learned that emancipation was only the beginning of a new and uncharted future, and they did not receive much in the way of direction from either Northern or Southern whites. In December 1864 one of Sherman’s corps commanders—the inaptly named Jefferson C. Davis—marched his troops across Ebenezer Creek, just north of Savannah, on a pontoon bridge built by his engineers, then took up the bridge and abandoned some 2,000 “contrabands” to the mercies of pursuing Confederate cavalry. The Federal armies frequently seized newly freed slaves and forced them into service as manual laborers, while embittered Southern whites evicted their former slaves from white-owned property and refused to hire freedpeople to work for them. Another 135,000 freedmen, lacking any particular direction for the future, simply enlisted in the USCT and hoped for the best.
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In a few places in the South, conscientious whites attempted to intervene and help the freedpeople toward literacy and economic independence. The Northern “Gideonites” who descended on Port Royal in 1862 set up schools and churches and pressed the Lincoln administration (through their own influential political networks at home) to have the plantations that had been abandoned by Port Royal’s white masters before the Union seizure of the Sea Islands divided among the former slaves who had once worked those lands. Even so, as the abolitionist William Kimball protested in 1864, the United States could not simply “unloose the chains that have bound them” and then take no further action; to “set them adrift to contend and compete under our methods of individualism or isolated interests, is to doom them to conditions hardly to be preferred to those from which they are about to escape.” In 1865, Congress took its own steps for setting the freedpeople on their feet by organizing the Freedmen’s Bureau, which was designed to establish schools, educate blacks in the intricacies of labor contracts, oversee wage and labor relations, and open up public lands to black settlers. But the experiment in land redistribution at Port Royal foundered on the greed of Northern white land speculators (who had the money to outbid the freedpeople at the open auctions of seized Confederate property) and on postwar legal challenges lodged by former plantation owners who successfully disputed the federal government’s wartime authority to seize their
property. And the Freedmen’s Bureau was never sufficiently funded or staffed to deal with the multitude of problems arising from the needs of 2 million newly freed slaves. Yet it was the most significant step toward actively engineering some small measure of racial equality taken by the United States before the 1960s.
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In the end, the most important agents for change would have to be the freedpeople themselves, since (in the abolitionists’ lexicon) self-transformation was the most appropriate form of change in a republic. As the freedpeople soon learned, even the most well-intentioned white assistance (such as Kimball’s) reeked of paternalism and was based on condescending perceptions of blacks as “a people in a state of infantile weakness and inexperience; whom, from the irrepressible laws and conditions of the human mind, we must govern and control, either wisely and beneficently or otherwise.” Many freedpeople simply hit the road, sometimes in a nameless determination to put the scenes of slavery behind them, sometimes in a pathetic search for family members who had been sold away to other parts of the South years before, sometime in pursuit of land or work they could own and define for themselves. “They had a passion, not for wandering, as for getting together,” wrote one white observer in South Carolina, “and every mother’s son among them seemed to be in search of his mother; every mother in search of her children. In their eyes the work of emancipation was incomplete until the families which had been dispersed by slavery were reunited.” Others sought to strike down roots in the soil they knew the best. In central Tennessee, the number of farms shot up from 19,000 in 1860 to nearly 30,000 in 1870, with more than three-quarters of that increase representing black farmers who either owned or rented their land.
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That did not mean, however, that they were eager to assimilate themselves to white society. Blacks withdrew from the white churches where their masters had ruled over faith and practice, and formed their own congregations. In defiance of the most vicious symbol of white dominance under slavery, the freedpeople rushed to county courthouses to legalize slave marriages and adopt surnames of their own choosing. In July 1865 Tennessee’s Bedford County courthouse issued marriage licenses to 422 couples, 406 of which were black; in nearby Rutherford County that September, 431 black couples had their marriages legalized in a single week. Never again would a white man with an auctioneer’s bill in his hand come between black husband and black wife, and never again would an African American be known simply as so-and-so’s Tom or Dick or Cuffee or Caesar. Mr. Carver’s George would become George Washington Carver; James Burroughs’s child slave Booker would
borrow his stepfather’s first name to create a last name for himself and become Booker Taliaferro Washington.
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So many of these steps seem so basic, and others so halting, that it is easy to lose sight of how much ground was really gained by African Americans in their stride toward civil equality. On one hand, it was disappointingly true that, as late as the 1850s, whites in Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, and Oregon had voted to ban any free black settlement in their states. Outside New England, where free black males already had some measure of voting rights, not a single Northern state initiative to extend voting rights to blacks succeeded during the war, and publicly funded schooling remained closed to blacks in most Northern states. On the other hand, the thick carapace of prejudice and legalized discrimination was also showing clear and open cracks under the hammer blows of the black soldier and the black orator. Five New England cities voted to abolish segregated schools; California and Illinois repealed all of their invidious “black laws” (except, in Illinois, the ban on black voting). On the federal level, Congress repealed exclusionary laws on racial hiring and abolished its restraints on black participation in the federal court system, and on February 1, 1865, John S. Rock was presented by Charles Sumner to plead before the bar of the Supreme Court, the first African American to be admitted as counsel before a court that a decade before had declared that he was not even a citizen. “The Dred Scott Decision Buried in the Supreme Court,” ran the
New York Tribune
’s headline. The article went on to say, “Senator Charles Sumner and the Negro lawyer John S. Rock [were] the pall-bearers—the room of the Supreme Court of the United States the Potter’s Field—the corpse the Dred Scott decision!”
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For African Americans, the future seemed without limits: three centuries of bondage had passed away, and even if African Americans had not yet achieved the levels of equality they yearned for, they had still reached levels none had ever dreamed possible before the war. In November 1864, two weeks after Maryland officially abolished slavery, Frederick Douglass returned to Baltimore for the first time since his flight from slavery twenty-six years before. He was “awed into silence” by the changes the war had wrought, and as he spoke to a racially mixed meeting at an African American church, he declared that “the revolution is genuine, full and complete.”
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Douglass was, for once, being an optimist. It was not an optimism widely shared by other racial minorities who found themselves with less at stake and thus less to
gain by the war. By 1861, many of the most familiar Indian tribes had been driven out of their ancient lands east of the Mississippi and either penned into reservations and “civilized” with white agriculture, education, and churches or else forcibly relocated west of Mississippi with the tribes of the unsettled western plains. Few of these uprooted eastern tribes had much connection with the larger issue of slavery and disunion, except for the “civilized” Cherokees of the federally designated “Indian Territory” south of Kansas, who had been removed from their Alabama and Georgia homelands in the 1830s and who retained black slavery and a rudimentary plantation system.

Like blacks, Indians seized on the war as an opportunity for advancing or protecting political agendas of their own, although in the case of the Indians, those agendas varied from place to place and tribe to tribe. The Iroquois of western New York had been resisting federal pressure to surrender their reservation lands and move west since the 1830s, and during the Civil War many Iroquois stepped forward to volunteer for the Union army on the premise that Iroquois cooperation in winning the war would induce an appreciative federal government to leave them alone on their lands. In southern Minnesota, the failure of the federal government to meet its treaty obligations with the Santee (Eastern Dakota) Sioux of the Minnesota River reservation provoked a bloody uprising in August 1862 that led to the deaths of more than 350 white settlers. In the Indian Territory, intratribal political factions among Cherokee, Creeks, and Seminoles led to a miniature civil war among the tribes, with various factions soliciting Confederate or Union intervention in the Territory to promote their own control. The semi-nomadic tribes on the plains of the unorganized western territories took advantage of the withdrawal of Federal regular units to overrun white settlements and communications routes to the Pacific.
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The more Native Americans involved themselves in the Civil War, the more they seemed to lose by it. As many as 2,000 Iroquois may have volunteered for Union service, including the nearly all-Iroquois 132nd New York, but their willingness to fight for the Union was interpreted by the federal government as a willingness to further assimilate themselves into white culture, and it only fed postwar government pressures to dissolve the New York reservations and, as a New York state legislature report recommended, absorb the Iroquois “into the great mass of the American people.” The Sioux uprising in Minnesota was brutally suppressed by hastily recalled Union troops, and thirty-eight Sioux and half-Sioux were hanged for their role in the uprising on December 26, 1862. The tribes of the Indian Territory were devastated by fighting between pro-Confederate and pro-Union bands all through the war, and the plains tribes suffered much more in the long run by the withdrawal of the
regulars than they could have imagined. In the absence of the regulars, untrained and vengeful white western volunteer regiments took up responsibility for dealing with unruly bands of Cheyenne, Mescalero, Navajo, Comanche, and Kiowa, and the volunteers showed little of the discipline and none of the restraint that the regulars had exercised on western outpost duty. On November 29, 1864, 600 peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho who had camped at Sand Creek, Colorado, under promises of protection by Federal troops at nearby Fort Lyon were surprised by a force of Colorado volunteers determined to avenge Cheyenne raids on white settlements on the Platte River. The Cheyenne chief Black Kettle vainly waved a large Stars and Stripes to prove the peaceful intentions of his village, but the Colorado volunteers cut down 150 Cheyenne and Arapaho, most of them women and children whom the white volunteers afterward mutilated.
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Other, less visible ethnic and racial groups saw their fortunes fluctuate during the war as well. Stereotyped images among Anglo-Americans defined Jews as cunning moneylenders and “Shylocks.” “What else could be expected from a Jew but money-getting?” asked the
Southern Illustrated News
in an 1863 article titled “Extortioners.” Those prejudices guaranteed that American Jews would be regularly targeted in both North and South as aliens and swindlers who fattened themselves, through war contracts and shady dealing, on the sufferings of their presumably Christian neighbors. In December 1862 Ulysses Grant grew so convinced that “the Jews, as a class” were guilty of “violating every regulation of trade established by … Department orders,” that he ordered the expulsion of “this class of people” from his Mississippi military district—not thinking that this order would include sutlers as well as more than a few Jewish soldiers. The protests that erupted over Grant’s order (including a Senate resolution condemning it as “illegal, tyrannical, cruel and unjust”) went all the way up to Lincoln, who promptly had the order rescinded. Grant’s prejudices notwithstanding, 7,000 Jews (out of an American Jewish population of about 150,000) enlisted to fight for the Union, and six of them won the Congressional Medal of Honor for bravery in action, while another 1,340 Jews joined the Confederate forces.
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Hispanic Americans constituted an even smaller piece of the American ethnic pie, especially since the Anglo-Texans who turned Texas into an American republic
and then an American state in the 1840s successfully drove most of Texas’s small Hispanic population south into Mexico. However, when Confederate Texans mounted a small-scale invasion of the New Mexico territory in early 1862, a combined force of Federal regulars, Colorado militia, and a company of the mostly Hispanic 2nd New Mexico Volunteers under Lt. Col. Manuel Chavez faced the Texans at Glorieta Pass, on the Santa Fe Trail. Together, on March 28, 1862, the Anglo-Hispanic Union troops administered a thorough drubbing to the Texans, sinking Confederate hopes of western conquest beneath the sands of the New Mexico desert.
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