Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction (92 page)

Many of the carpetbaggers, in fact, were actually welcomed by Southerners for the investment capital they brought into the war-scorched South. They came largely from the ranks of the same middle-class business and professionals who filled the ranks of the Republican Party. The carpetbaggers struck up political alliances with the disgruntled Southern scalawags who, like William Brownlow, blamed the South’s destruction on the planters, and were happy to engineer a new Republican political order in the South. Like the carpetbaggers, the scalawags were neither angels nor devils: many of them had been Southern Whigs in the 1840s and ’50s, while some had been born in the North but came South before the war to seek their fortunes, and still others had been anti-war dissidents.
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The carpetbaggers struck up an even more critical alliance with the freedmen of the South and with the tiny cadre of free Southern blacks who at first formed the core of black political leadership in the South. Once congressional Reconstruction torpedoed the Black Codes and secured the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, black voters entered into Southern political life in substantial numbers. More than 2,000 black men held political office, ranging from Hiram Revels, who took over Jefferson Davis’s old Mississippi Senate seat in 1870, and P. B. S. Pinch-back, the governor pro tem of Louisiana in 1872, all the way down the scale of office to sheriffs, registrars, and justices of the peace. Later critics of Reconstruction would ridicule these black officeholders as barefoot illiterates fresh from the cotton fields. In its “qualities of ignorance, corruption and depravity,” complained
ex-Confederate congressman Ethelbert Barksdale in 1890, Mississippi’s Reconstruction constitutional convention “was … a fool’s paradise for the negroes,” and even the sympathetic New Yorker George Templeton Strong could not suppress a smirk over reports about “the enfranchised field hand, a phrase or two about the honorable member from Congo, and the intelligent boot-black who represents the county of Tackahoosho, and some stories of black voters putting their ballots into the post office.” What neither Barksdale nor Strong noticed, or wanted to notice, was that almost half of the black officeholders had been born free, and the sprinkling of college graduates, lawyers, and Union army veterans among the black officeholders holds up at least as well (given the paucity of opportunities for education and advancement for African Americans in the Confederate South) by comparison with the prewar patterns of white officeholding. Nor did they constitute some universal blight on Southern government; in only one state legislature—South Carolina—were freedmen actually a majority.
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The new civil governments that this three-way alliance of carpetbaggers, scalawags, and freedmen created under the eye of the Federal military district commanders were far from perfect. True to at least one aspect of the legend of the carpetbaggers, the new Reconstruction governments spent money on an unprecedented scale, and raised Southern taxes to extraordinary levels to finance that spending, all of which later led to accusations that the money had been squandered on shady contracts and corrupt deals. In South Carolina, the tax rates doubled even though the war had wiped out property values; and while the state debt jumped from $5 million in 1868 to over $16 million in 1871, legislators voted themselves a free bar, and even a bonus of $1,000 to the Speaker of the House, Franklin J. Moses, to cover his losses at the racetrack.
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But much of this political vulgarity stemmed from the sheer confusion and dislocation of the postwar years, and from the costs of building the free-labor Jerusalem in the South’s brown and devastated land. The infrastructure of roads, rail lines, and harbors had been devastated by the war, and transforming the Southern landscape into a replica of schoolhouses, shops, and whitewashed churches left little alternative
to vastly increased taxation and spending. Whatever the degree of corruption plaguing the congressional Reconstruction governments, they did bring vast numbers of new voters, both newly free blacks and Southern yeomen, into a more broadly based democratic process than had ever before prevailed in the South.
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By the end of 1868, this new alliance of Southern blacks and Southern and Northern whites had completely restructured the constitutions of six of the Southern states and incorporated the Fourteenth Amendment into the political heartland of the old Confederacy.

In despair, some of the most ardent old secessionists counseled accommodation or even outright capitulation. Robert E. Lee’s old lieutenant James Longstreet accepted the lucrative federal post of customs surveyor in Republican New Orleans and campaigned for Grant in 1868. Former Georgia governor Joseph Brown and former South Carolina representative (and Speaker of the U.S. House) James Lawrence Orr, also joined the Republicans and advocated cooperation with the Radicals. J. D. B. DeBow revived the old
DeBow’s Review
and called upon Southerners to encourage the immigration of Northern workers and Northern industry. In 1869, when Congress adopted the Fifteenth Amendment, which specifically prohibited any abridgement of voting rights “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude,” the new Southern governments ratified the amendment in less than a year. By 1870 all of the former Confederate states had been satisfactorily reconstructed and readmitted to the Union.
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The Civil War, at least in the sense that secession had made it, now seemed complete.

Yet, despite the apparent successes of congressional Reconstruction, the health of the Reconstruction governments remained critically dependent on two restraints. One was the continued exclusion of the most dangerous ex-Confederates from political power in the South, and the other was continued support and encouragement from Washington, especially in the form of soldiers who would be available to enforce the civil rights statutes. During Ulysses S. Grant’s two terms as president, from 1869 until 1877, both of those restraints gradually melted away.

Some of the slow erosion of federal support for Reconstruction occurred simply from attrition. Thaddeus Stevens died in August 1868, asking to be buried in a segregated cemetery for African American paupers so that “I might illustrate in death the principles which I advocated through a long life, Equality of man before his Creator.” The next year, Ben Wade lost his powerful Senate seat when the Ohio legislature was captured by Democrats; Edwin Stanton died on Christmas Eve, 1869, only
four days after Grant nominated him to sit on the Supreme Court; Henry Wilson left the Senate in 1872 to run as Grant’s vice president, and died in 1875; James Ashley accepted the territorial governorship of Montana from Grant and left Congress; Salmon P. Chase drifted back to his old Democratic friends and died in the spring of 1873; Charles Sumner followed him the next year, having pleaded with Congress to pass a newer and more stringent civil rights bill (which it did in 1875).
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Also gone was the Republican majority in the House, which was replaced in 1874 by the first Democratic majority since the beginning of the Civil War, and the Republican majority in the Senate, which was lost in the elections of 1878. Without the cutting edge provided by Stevens, Wade, and Sumner, the surviving Radicals lost their taste for bold interventions in state affairs. Not until 1888 would Republicans regain sufficient numbers in Congress to renew their efforts to impose federal supervision of Southern voting with a fresh “Force Bill,” drafted by Henry Cabot Lodge. The bill passed the House, only to die a lingering death in the Senate. It had all been, in the memorable title of Judge Albion Tourgee’s 1879 memoir, “a fool’s errand, by one of the fools.”
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As it was, they got little enough encouragement from President Grant. Although Grant’s administration has frequently been portrayed as a miasma of corruption, presided over by a military genius who turned out to be a political nincompoop, his administration was probably no more spotted than most of the prewar administrations—James Buchanan, for instance, presided over one of the most corrupt cabinets in the nineteenth century—and not much worse, in fact, than the graft and bribery that went on under the table of Lincoln’s wartime administration. Grant was also more politically skilled than his critics estimated, as his adroit sidestepping of Andrew Johnson demonstrated. And he demonstrated considerable determination to smash anti-black civil violence from the Ku Klux Klan. On the other hand, it was also true that Grant was not a political risk taker. His slogan—“Let us have peace”— guaranteed that he would take equal offense at the prodding of both Radicals and Democrats, unless it was skillfully handled, and as the Radicals lost the services of Wade, Ashley, Stevens, and Sumner, the prodding became progressively more flaccid. By that time, even the Republican faithful had lost heart in the fight. The cries for help from Southern blacks for government intervention increasingly came to sound in Republican ears like the demands of populist farmers for currency inflation or unionized workers for economic regulation. “Is it not time for the colored race to stop playing the baby,” asked the
Chicago Tribune
irritably in 1875.
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In disgust, many of the surviving Radicals staged a back-door rebellion in 1872 in an effort to dump Grant from the party ticket, and they eventually ran Horace Greeley as the joint presidential nominee of what was briefly called the Liberal Republicans, as well as the Democrats. Greeley was crushed in the election (he failed to win even a single electoral vote), but the divisions made in the Republican Party’s ranks only further weakened their resolve to enforce the Reconstruction legislation their party had created. In the fall of 1875, when gun-toting whites in Mississippi attacked Republican political rallies in Yazoo City and Jackson, the Republican governor, a former Union army general named Adelbert Ames, appealed to Grant for troops to put down the rioters. So did Daniel H. Chamberlain, the Republican governor of South Carolina, after six blacks were shot to death in Hamburg, South Carolina, as whites attempted to disarm a “colored militia.” Officially, Grant promised Reconstruction governors “every aid for which I can find law or constitutional power. Government that cannot give protection to then life, property, and all guaranteed civil rights … to the citizen … is in so far a failure.” Unofficially, Grant and his attorney general informed Adelbert Ames that “the whole public are tired out with these annual autumnal outbreaks in the South and the great majority are now ready to condemn any interference on the part of the government.” No troops were sent; the federal forces already stationed in Mississippi remained in their barracks. The following spring Ames resigned.
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The failure of Radical Republican nerve after 1870 is linked, as Grant’s telegram to Ames indicated, to a larger loss of interest in Reconstruction across the North. As the Civil War and its burning issues receded from memory, as a new generation and a new decade turned its energies westward, as a new flood of immigrants (for whom the Civil War was a topic of only incidental interest, and for whom African Americans represented only an unwelcome source of competition for jobs) poured into the ports of the East Coast and California, Reconstruction became simply an uninteresting holdover from a political era that was rapidly closing. As early as 1867, Illinois Radical Elihu Washburne was warned by former Philadelphia congressman Henry D. Moore that, even though “the Republican Party have done a great work for the Negro … we should be satisfied
for the present
with what we
have
done, and protect him in the rights we have given him in those States where he was formerly a Slave and had no rights at all, but here we should stop.”
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It was easy, after five more years of political infighting, to believe that with congressional Reconstruction and the Fifteenth Amendment, everything had been done for the African American that ought to be done.

In fact, some of the most important aspects of a complete Reconstruction remained ominously incomplete. The freedpeople now had citizenship and political
rights, but those rights might have a short life span if unaccompanied by economic leverage. The Freedmen’s Bureau struggled for the few years of its life to serve as a national employment bureau for black laborers, and even paid to transfer 30,000 freemen to jobs in Texas, Mississippi, Illinois, and Massachusetts. But comparatively few of the freedpeople wanted to work if it meant working in the South, and many of the employers in the North wanted little more than a handy pool of strikebreakers to draw from. Johnson’s pardon schemes overturned any possibility of a massive redistribution of land from the hands of Southern whites to those of Southern blacks, and few even of the Radicals were prepared to make much of a point about promoting black land ownership.

Republican ideas of political economy praised the free wage laborer and independent property owner as the foundation of liberty—which, ironically, was the very conviction that restrained the Radicals from the wholesale appropriation of someone else’s property (even rebel property) to make property owners out of the freedpeople. In large measure, the Radicals’ willingness to use military force and army generals to ensure black voting rights was simply an effort to substitute armed federal force for the more unappetizing alternative of land redistribution. But political rights divorced from economic realities, and from economic clout, can easily turn weightless, and once the political will to enforce black voting rights began to dissipate, the entire structure of African Americans’ hard-won civil equality began to come apart.
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And then, by the end of Grant’s second administration, it started to disappear entirely. In 1873, a massive economic depression, triggered in the United States by the financial collapse of Jay Cooke, turned Northern attention away from the political survival of Reconstruction to the economic survival of the Northern economy. At the same time, the Supreme Court, ever the stronghold of Democratic disgruntlement since
Dred Scott
, handed down a critical civil rights decision on an 1873 appeal by New Orleans butchers against a Louisiana state charter that monopolized meatpacking in New Orleans. In the
Slaughterhouse Cases
, the butchers sued under the equal protection provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment, but the Supreme Court replied that the amendment applied only to equal protection under
federal
law, not state law. “There is a citizenship of the United States, and a citizenship of the State, which are distinct from each other”—hence, the “privileges and immunities” attached to federal citizenship had no application to state governments.
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