Northerners had, most of them, convinced themselves that the South would never dare to secede. The danger of servile insurrections, if nothing else, would prevent it.[83]Many Southerners, on the other hand, could not see how, under the Constitution, the North could venture on coercion.
But to the South the greatest surprise furnished by the events of that era has been Abraham Lincoln—as he appears now in the light of history. What, in the minds of Southerners, fixed his status personally, during the canvass of 1860, was the statement he had made in his speech at Chicago, preliminary to his great debate with Douglas in 1858, that the Union could not "continue to exist half slave and half free." And he was now the candidate of the "Black Republican" party, a party that was denouncing a decision of the Supreme Court; that, in nearly every State in the North, had nullified the fugitive slave law, and that stood for "negro equality," as the South termed it.
There were other statements by Mr. Lincoln in that debate with Douglas that the South has had especial reason to take note of since the period of Reconstruction. At Springfield, Illinois, September 18, 1858, he said: "There is a physical difference between the white and black races which, I believe, will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality, and, inasmuch as they can not so live, while they do live together there must be the position of superior and inferior; and I, as much as any other man, am in favor of having that position assigned to the white man."
The new Confederacy took the Constitution of the United States, so modified as to make it read plainly as Jefferson had expounded it in the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798. Other changes were slight. The presidential term was extended to six years and the President was not to be re-eligible. The slave trade was prohibited and Congress was authorized to forbid the introduction of slaves from the old Union.
Abraham Lincoln became President, with a fixed resolve to preserve the Union but with no intent to abolish slavery. Had the war for the Union been as successful as he hoped it would be, slavery would not have been abolished by any act of his. It is clear that, when inaugurated, he had not changed his opinions expressed at Springfield, nor those others, which, at Peoria, Illinois, on October 16, 1854, he had stated thus: "When our Southern brethren tell us they are no more responsible for slavery than we are, I acknowledge the fact. When it is said the institution exists and it is very difficult to get rid of it in any satisfactory way, I can understand and appreciate the saying. I will surely not blame them for not doing what I should not know how to do myself. If all earthly power were given me, I should not know what to do as to the institution. My first impulse would be to free all the slaves and send them to Liberia, their native land."
This, he said, it was impracticable to do, at least suddenly, and then proceeded: "To free them all and keep them among us as underlings—is it quite certain that this would better their condition?... What next? Free them and make them politically and socially our equals?" This question he answered in the negative, and continued: "It does seem to me that systems of gradual emancipation might be adopted, but for their tardiness I will not undertake to judge our brethren of the South."
In these extracts from his speeches we find a central thread that runs through the history of his whole administration. We see it again when, pressed by extremists, Mr. Lincoln said in an open letter to Horace Greeley, August 22, 1862: "My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and it is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that."
Indeed, Congress had, in 1861, by joint resolution declared that the sole purpose of the war was the preservation of the Union. In no other way, and for no other purpose, could the North at that time have been induced to wage war against the South.
Abraham Lincoln, the President of the United States, and Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederate States, were both Kentuckians by birth, both Americans. In the purity of their lives, public and private, in patriotic devotion to the preservation of American institutions as understood by each of them, they were alike; but they represented different phases of American thought, and each was the creature more or less of his environment. Both were men of commanding ability, but the destiny of each was shaped by agencies that now seem to have been directed by the hand of Fate. Mr. Lincoln, by nature a political genius, was carried to Illinois when a child, reared in the North-west among those to whom, with the Mississippi River as their only outlet to the markets of the world, disunion, with its loss of their highway to the sea, was unthinkable. Lincoln became a Whig, with the Union of the States the passion of his life, and finally, by forces he had not himself put in motion, he was placed at the head of the Federal Government at a time when sectionalism had decided that the question of the permanence of the Union was to be tried out, once and forever.
Mr. Davis went from Kentucky further South. He was a Democrat, and environment also moulded his opinions. During the long sectional controversy between the North and the South, "State-rights" became the passion of his life, and when the clash between the sections came, he found himself, without his seeking, at the head of the Confederacy. He had been prominent among the Southerners at Washington, who had hoped that the South, by threats of secession, might obtain its rights in the Union, as had been done in Jefferson's days by New England. In the movement (1860-61) that resulted in secession, the people at home had been ahead of their congressmen. William L. Yancey, then in Alabama, not Jefferson Davis at Washington, was the actual leader of the secessionists. Mr. Davis feared a long and bloody war and, unlike Yancey, he had doubts as to its result.[84]
Mr. Lincoln, standing for the Union, succeeded in the war, but just as he was on the threshold of his great work of Reconstruction he fell, the victim of a crazy assassin. Martyrdom to his cause has naturally added some cubits to the just measure of his wonderful reputation.
Jefferson Davis and his cause failed; and the triumphant forces that swept the Confederacy out of existence have long (and quite naturally) sought to bury the cause of the South and its chosen leader in ignominy. But the days of hate and passion are past; reason is reasserting her sway; and history will do justice to both the Confederacy and its great leader, whose ability, patriotism, and courage were conspicuous to the end.
Mr. Davis was also a martyr—his long imprisonment, the manacles he wore, the sentinel gazing on him in the bright light that day and night disturbed his rest; the heroism with which he endured all this, and the quiet dignity of his after life—these have doubly endeared his memory to those for whose cause he suffered.
Mr. Lincoln had remarkable political tact—he seemed to know how long to wait and when to act, and, if we may credit Mr. Welles,[85] his inflexibly honest Secretary of the Navy, he was, with the members of his cabinet, wonderfully patient and even long-suffering. And although he was the subject of much abuse, especially at the hands of Southerners who then totally misunderstood him, he was animated always by the philosophy of his own famous words, "With malice towards none, with charity for all." Never for one moment did he forget, amidst even the bitterest of his trials, that the Confederates, then in arms against him, were, as he regarded them, his misguided fellow-citizens; and the supreme purpose of his life was to bring them back into the Union, not as conquered foes, but as happy and contented citizens of the great republic.
The resources of the Confederacy and the United States were very unequal. The Confederacy had no army, no navy, no factories, save here and there a flour mill or cotton factory, and practically no machine shops that could furnish engines for its railroads. It had one cannon foundry. The Tredegar Iron Works, at Richmond, Virginia, was a fully equipped cannon foundry. The Confederacy's arms and munitions of war were not sufficient to supply the troops that volunteered during the first six months of military operations. Its further supplies, except such as the Tredegar works furnished, depended on importations through the blockade soon to be established and such as might be captured.
The North had the army and navy, factories of every description, food in abundance, and free access to the ports of the world.
The population of the North was 22,339,978.
The population of the South was 9,103,332, of which 3,653,870 were colored. The total white male population of the Confederacy, of all ages, was 2,799,818.
The reports of the Adjutant-General of the United States, November 9, 1880, show 2,859,132 men mustered into the service of the United States in 1861-65. General Marcus J. Wright, of the United States War Records Office, in his latest estimate of Confederate enlistments, places the outside number at 700,000. The estimate of Colonel Henderson, of the staff of the British army, in his "Life of Stonewall Jackson," is 900,000. Colonel Thomas J. Livermore, of Boston, estimates the number of Confederates at about 1,000,000, and insists that in the Adjutant-General's reports of the Union enlistments there are errors that would bring down the number of Union soldiers to about 2,000,000. Colonel Livermore's estimates are earnestly combated by Confederate writers.
General Charles Francis Adams has, in a recently published volume,[86] cited figures given mostly by different Confederate authorities, which aggregate 1,052,000 Confederate enlistments. What authority these Confederate writers have relied on is not clear. The enlistments were for the most part directly in the Confederate army and not through State officials. The captured Confederate records should furnish the highest evidence. But it is earnestly insisted that these records are incomplete, and there is no purpose here to discuss a disputed point.
The call to arms was answered enthusiastically in both sections, but the South was more united in its convictions, and practically all her young manhood fell into line, the rich and the poor, the cultured and uncultured serving in the ranks side by side.
The devotion of the noble women of the North, and of its humanitarian associations, to the welfare of the Federal soldiers was remarkable, but there was nothing in the situation in that section that could evoke such a wonderful exhibition of heroism and self-sacrifice as was exhibited by the devoted women of the South, who made willingly every possible sacrifice to the cause of the Confederacy.
Both sides fought bravely. Excluding from the Union armies negroes, foreigners, and the descendants of recent immigrants, the Confederates and the Union soldiers were mainly of British stock. The Confederates had some notable advantages. Excepting a few Union regiments from the West, the Southerners were better shots and better horsemen, especially in the beginning of the war, than the Northerners; and the Southerners were fighting not only for the Constitution of their fathers and the defence of their homes, but for the supremacy of their race. They had also another military advantage, that would probably have been decisive but for the United States navy: they had interior lines of communication which would have enabled them to readily concentrate their forces. But the United States navy, hovering around their coast-line, not only neutralized but turned this advantage into a weakness, thus compelling the Confederates to scatter their armies. Every port had to be guarded.
In the West the Federals were almost uniformly successful in the greater battles, the Confederates winning in these but two decisive victories, Chickamauga and Sabine Cross Roads, in Louisiana. Estimating, according to the method of military experts, the percentage of losses of the victor only, Chickamauga was the bloodiest battle of the world, from and including Waterloo down to the present time. Gettysburg and Sharpsburg also rank as high in losses as any battle fought elsewhere in this long period, which takes in the Franco-German and the Russo-Japanese wars. At Sharpsburg or Antietam the losses exceeded those in any other one day's battle.[87]
The Confederates were successful, excepting Antietam or Sharpsburg and Gettysburg, and perhaps Seven Pines or Fair Oaks, in all the great battles in the East, down to the time when the shattered remnant of Lee's army was overwhelmed at Petersburg and surrendered at Appomattox. The élan the Southerners acquired in the many victories they won fighting for their homes is not to be overlooked. But the failure of the North with its overwhelming numbers and resources, to overcome the resistance of the half-famished Confederates until nearly four years had elapsed, can only be fully accounted for, in fairness to the undoubted courage of the Union armies, by the fact, on which foreign military critics are agreed, that the North had no such generals as Lee and Stonewall Jackson. Only by the superior generalship of their leaders could the Confederates have won as many battles as they did against vastly superior numbers.
But against the United States navy the brilliant generalship of the Confederates and their marvellous courage were powerless.
Accepted histories of the war have been written largely by the army and its friends, and, strangely enough, the general historians have been so attracted by the gallantry displayed in great land battles, and the immediate results, that they have utterly failed to appreciate the services of the United States navy.
The Southerners accomplished remarkable results with torpedoes with the Merrimac or Virginia and their little fleet of commerce destroyers; but the United States navy, by its effective blockade, starved the Confederacy to death. The Southern government could not market its cotton, nor could it import or manufacture enough military supplies. Among its extremest needs were rails and rolling stock to refit its lines of communication. For want of transportation it was unable to concentrate its armies, and for the same reason its troops were not half fed.
In addition to its services on the blockade, which, in Lord Wolseley's opinion, decided the war, the navy, with General Grant's help, cut the Confederacy in twain by way of the Mississippi. It penetrated every Southern river, severing Confederate communications and destroying depots of supplies. It assisted in the capture, early in the war, of Forts Henry and Donelson, and it conducted Union troops along the Tennessee River into east Tennessee and north Alabama. It furnished objective points and supplies at Savannah, Charleston, and Wilmington, to Sherman on his march from Atlanta; and finally Grant, the great Union general, who had failed to reach Richmond by way of the Wilderness, Spottsylvania, and Cold Harbor, achieved success only when the navy was at his back, holding his base, while he laid a nine months' siege to Petersburg.
That distinguished author, Charles Francis Adams, himself a Union general in the Army of the Potomac, says that the United States navy was the deciding factor in the Civil War. He even says that every single successful operation of the Union forces "hinged and depended on naval supremacy."
The following is from the preface to "The Crisis of the Confederacy," in which, published in 1905, a foreign expert, Captain Cecil Battine, of the King's Hussars, condenses all that needs further to be said here about the purely military side of the Civil War:
The history of the American Civil War still remains the most important theme for the student and the statesman because it was waged between adversaries of the highest intelligence and courage, who fought by land and sea over an enormous area with every device within the reach of human ingenuity, and who had to create every organization needed for the purpose after the struggle had begun. The admiration which the valor of the Confederate soldiers, fighting against superior numbers and resources, excited in Europe; the dazzling genius of some of the Confederate generals, and in some measure jealousy at the power of the United States, have ranged the sympathies of the world during the war and ever since to a large degree on the side of the vanquished. Justice has hardly been done to the armies which arose time and again from sanguinary repulses, and from disasters more demoralizing than any repulse in the field, because they were caused by political and military incapacity in high places, to redeem which the soldiers freely shed their blood as it seemed in vain. If the heroic endurance of the Southern people and the fiery valor of the Southern armies thrill us to-day with wonder and admiration, the stubborn tenacity and courage which succeeded in preserving intact the heritage of the American nation, and which triumphed over foes so formidable, are not less worthy of praise and imitation. The Americans still hold the world's record for hard fighting.
The great majority of the Union soldiers enlisted for the preservation of the Union and not for the abolition of slavery. But among these soldiers there was an abolition element, and very soon the tramp of federal regiments was keeping time to
"John Brown's body lies a mouldering in the ground,
As we go marching on."
Early in the war Generals Frémont and Butler issued orders declaring free the slaves within the Union lines; these orders President Lincoln rescinded. But Abolition sentiment was growing in the army and at the North, and the pressure upon the President to strike at slavery was increasing. The Union forces were suffering repeated defeats; slaves at home were growing food crops and caring for the families of Confederates who were fighting at the front, and in September, 1862, President Lincoln issued his preliminary proclamation of emancipation, basing it on the ground of military necessity. It was to become effective January 1, 1863.
And here was the same Lincoln who had declared in 1858 his opinion that whites and blacks could not live together as equals, socially and politically; and it was the very same Lincoln who had repeatedly said he cherished no ill-will against his Southern brethren. If the slaves were to be freed, they and the whites should not be left together. He therefore sought diligently to find some home for the freedmen in a foreign country. But unfortunately, as already seen, the American negro, a bone of contention at home, was now a pariah to other peoples. Most nations welcome immigrants, but no country was willing to shelter the American freedman, save only Liberia, long before a proven failure, and Hayti, where, under the blacks, anarchy had already been chronic for half a century. Hume tells us, in "The Abolitionists," that for a time Mr. Lincoln even considered setting Texas apart as a home for the negro.
Later the surrender of the Confederate armies, together with the adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, consummated emancipation, foreseeing which President Lincoln formulated his plan of Reconstruction. Suffrage in the reconstructed States under his plan was to be limited to those who were qualified to vote at the date of secession, which meant the whites. The sole exception he ever made to this rule was a suggestion to Governor Hahn, of Louisiana, that it might be well for the whites (of Louisiana) to give the ballot to a few of the most intelligent of the negroes and to such as had served in the army.
The part the soldiers played, Federal and Confederate, in restoring the Union, is a short story. The clash between them settled without reserve the only question that was really in issue—secession; slavery, that had been the origin of sectional dissensions, was eliminated because it obstructed the success of the Union armies. By their gallantry in battle and conduct toward each other the men in blue and the men in gray restored between the North and the South the mutual respect that had been lost in the bitterness of sectional strife, and without which there could be no fraternal Union.
Mr. Gladstone, when the war was on, said that the North was endeavoring to "propagate free institutions at the point of the sword." The North was not seeking to propagate in the South any new institution whatever. Mr. Gladstone's paradox loses its point because both sections were fighting for the preservation of the same system of government.
The time has now happily come when, to use the language of Senator Hoar, as Americans, we can, North and South, discuss the causes that brought about our terrible war "in a friendly and quiet spirit, without recrimination and without heat, each understanding the other, each striving to help the other, as men who are bearing a common burden and looking forward with a common hope."
The country, it is believed, has already reached the conclusions that the South was absolutely honest in maintaining the right of secession and absolutely unswerving in its devotion to its ideas of the Constitution, and that the North was equally honest and patriotic in its fidelity to the Union. We need to advance one step further. Somebody was to blame for starting a quarrel between brethren who were dwelling together in amity. If Americans can agree in fixing that blame, the knowledge thus acquired should help them to avoid such troubles hereafter.
It seems to be a fair conclusion that the initial cause of all our troubles was the formation by Garrison of those Abolition societies which the Boston people in their resolutions of August 1, 1835, "disapproved of" and described as "associations instituted in the non-slave-holding States, with the intent to act, within the slave-holding States, on the subject of slavery in those States, without their consent." And further, that it was the creation of these societies, the methods they resorted to, and their explicit defiance of the Constitution that roused the fears and passions of the South and caused that section to take up the quarrel that, afterward became sectional; and that, after much hot dispute and many regrettable incidents, North and South, resulted in secession and war.
In every dispute about slavery prior to 1831, the Constitution was always regarded by every disputant as supreme. The quarrel that was fatal to the peace of the Union began when the New Abolitionists put in the new claim, that slavery in the South was the concern of the North, as well as of the South, and that there was a higher law than the Constitution. If the conscience of the individual, instead of human law, is to prescribe rules of conduct, society is at the mercy of anarchists. Czolgosz was conscientious when he murdered McKinley.
Had all Americans continued to agree, after 1831, as they did before that time, that the Constitution of the United States was the supreme law of the land, there would have been no fatal sectional quarrel, no secession, and no war between the North and South.
The immediate surrender everywhere of the Confederates in obedience to the orders of their generals was an imposing spectacle. There was no guerilla warfare. The Confederates accepted their defeat in good faith and have ever since been absolutely loyal to the United States Government, but they have never changed their minds as to the justice of the cause they fought for. They fought for liberty regulated by law, and against the idea that there can be, under our system, any higher law than the Constitution of our country. That the Constitution should always be the supreme law of the land, they still believe, and the philosophic student of past and current history should be gratified to see the tenacity with which Southern people still cling to that idea. It suggests that not only will the Southerners be always ready to stand for our country against a foreign foe, but that whenever our institutions shall be assailed, as they will often be hereafter by visionaries who are impatient of restraints, the cause of liberty, regulated by law, will find staunch defenders in the Southern section of our country.
President Lincoln's theory was that acts of secession were void, and that when the seceded States came back into the Union those who were entitled to vote, by the laws existing at the date of the attempted secession, and had been pardoned, should have, and should control, the right of suffrage. Mr. Lincoln had acted on this theory in Tennessee, Louisiana, and Texas, and he further advised Congress, in his message of December, 1863, that this was his plan. Congress, after a long debate, responded in July, 1864, by an act claiming for itself power over Reconstruction. The President answered by a pocket veto, and after that veto Mr. Lincoln was, in November, 1864, re-elected on a platform extolling his "practical wisdom," etc. Congress, during the session that began in December, 1864, did not attempt to reassert its authority but adjourned, March 4, 1865, in sight of the collapse of the Confederacy, leaving the President an open field for his declared policy.
But unhappily, on the 14th of April, 1865, Mr. Lincoln was assassinated, and his death just at this time was the most appalling calamity that ever befell the American people. The blow fell chiefly upon the South, and it was the South the assassin had thought to benefit.
Had the great statesman lived he might, and it is fully believed he would, like Washington, have achieved a double success. Washington, successful in war, was successful in guiding his country through the first eight stormy years of its existence under a new constitution. Lincoln had guided the country through four years of war, and the Union was now safe. With Lee's surrender the war was practically at an end.
Gideon Welles says that on the 10th of April, 1865, Mr. Lincoln, "while I was with him at the White House, was informed that his fellow-citizens would call to congratulate him on the fall of Richmond and surrender of Lee; but he requested their visit should be delayed that he might have time to put his thoughts on paper, for he desired that his utterances on such an occasion should be deliberate and not liable to misapprehension, misinterpretation, or misconstruction. He therefore addressed the people on the following evening, Tuesday the 11th, in a carefully prepared speech intended to promote harmony and union.
"In this remarkable speech, delivered three days before his assassination, he stated he had prepared a plan for the reinauguration of the sectional authority and reconstruction in 1863, which would be acceptable to the executive government, and that every member of the cabinet fully approved the plan," etc.[88]
In view of his death three days later, this, his last and deliberate public utterance, may be regarded as Abraham Lincoln's will, devising as a legacy to his countrymen his plan of reconstruction. That plan in the hands of his successor was defeated by a partisan and radical Congress. That it was a wise plan the world now knows.
Senator John Sherman, of Ohio, was one of the most influential of those who succeeded in defeating it, and yet he lived to say, in his book published in 1895,[89] Andrew Johnson "adopted substantially the plan proposed and acted on by Mr. Lincoln. After this long lapse of time I am convinced that Mr. Johnson's scheme of reorganization was wise and judicious. It was unfortunate that it had not the sanction of Congress and that events soon brought the President and Congress into hostility."
And the present senator, Shelby Cullom, of Illinois, who as a member of the House of Representatives voted to overthrow the Lincoln-Johnson plan of Reconstruction, has furnished us further testimony. He says in his book, published in 1911:[90]
"To express it in a word, the motive of the opposition to the Johnson plan of Reconstruction was a firm conviction that its success would wreck the Republican party and, by restoring the Democracy to power, bring back Southern supremacy and Northern vassalage."
The Republican party, then dominant in Congress, felt when confronting Reconstruction that it was facing a crisis in its existence. The Democratic party, unitedly opposed to negro suffrage, was still in Northern States a power to be reckoned with. Allied with the Southern whites, that old party might again control the government unless, by giving the negro the ballot, the Republicans could gain, as Senator Sumner said, the "allies it needed." But the masses at the North were opposed to negro suffrage, and only two or three State constitutions sanctioned it. Indeed, it may be safely said that when Congress convened in December, 1865, a majority of the people of the North were ready to follow Johnson and approve the Lincoln plan of Reconstruction. But the extremists in both branches of the Congress had already determined to defeat the plan and to give the ballot to the ex-slave. To prepare the mind of the Northern people for their programme, they had resolved to rekindle the passions of the war, which were now smouldering, and utilize all the machinery, military and civilian, that Congress could make effective.
Andrew Johnson,[91] who as vice-president now succeeded to the presidency, though a man of ability, had little personal influence and none of Lincoln's tact. Johnson retained Lincoln's cabinet, and McCullough, who was Secretary of the Treasury under both presidents, says in his "Men and Measures of Half a Century," p. 378:
"The very same instrument for restoring the national authority over North Carolina and placing her where she stood before her secession, which had been approved by Mr. Lincoln, was, by Mr. Stanton, presented at the first cabinet which was held at the executive mansion after Mr. Lincoln's death, and, having been carefully considered at two or three meetings, was adopted as the Reconstruction policy of the administration."
Johnson carried out this plan. All the eleven seceding States repealed their ordinances of secession. Their voters, from which class many leaders had been excluded by the presidential proclamation, all took the oath of allegiance, and reconstructed their State governments. From most of the reconstructed States, senators and representatives were in Washington asking to be seated when Congress convened, December 4, 1865.
The presidential plan of Reconstruction had been promptly accepted by the people of the prostrate States. Almost without exception they had, when permitted, taken the oath and returned to their allegiance.
The wretchedness of these people in the spring of 1865 was indescribable. The labor system on which they depended for most of their money-producing crops was destroyed. Including the disabled, twenty per cent of the whites, who would now have been bread-winners, were gone. The credit system had been universal, and credit was gone. Banks were bankrupt. Confederate currency and bonds were worthless. Provisions were scarce and money even scarcer. Many landholders had not even plough stock with which to make a crop.
There was some cotton, however, that had escaped the ravages of war, and a large part of this also escaped the rapacious United States agents, who were seizing it as Confederate property. This cotton was a godsend. There was another supply of money that came from an unexpected source. The old anti-slavery controversy had made it seem perfectly clear to many moneyed men, North, that free labor was always superior to slave labor; and now, when cotton was bringing a good price, enterprising men carried their money, altogether some hundreds of thousands of dollars, into the several cotton States, to buy plantations and make cotton with free negro labor. Free negro labor was not a success. Those who had reckoned on it lost their money; but this money went into circulation and was helpful.
Above all else loomed the negro problem. Five millions of whites and three and a half millions of blacks were to live together. Thomas Jefferson had said, "Nothing is more certainly written in the Book of Fate than that these people are to be free; nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion have drawn indelible lines between them."[92] And it may truly be said of Jefferson that he was, as quite recently he was declared to be by Dr. Schurman, President of Cornell University, the "apostle of reason, and reason alone."
What system of laws could Southern conventions and legislatures frame, that would enable them to accomplish what Jefferson had declared was impossible? This was the question before these bodies when called together in 1865-66 by Johnson to rehabilitate their States. Two dangers confronted them. One was, armed bands of negroes, headed by returning negro soldiers. Mr. Lincoln had feared this. Early in April of that very year, 1865, he said to General Butler: "I can hardly believe that the South and North can live in peace unless we can get rid of the negroes, whom we have armed and disciplined, and who have fought with us, to the amount, I believe, of one hundred and fifty thousand." Mississippi, and perhaps one other State, to guard against the danger from this source, enacted that negroes were only to bear arms when licensed. This law was to be fiercely attacked.
The other chief danger was that idleness among the negroes would lead to crime. It soon became apparent that the negro idea was that freedom meant freedom from work. They would not work steadily, even for their Northern friends, who were offering ready money for labor in their cotton fields, and multitudes were loitering in towns and around Freedmen's Bureau offices. Nothing seemed better than the old-time remedies, apprenticeship and vagrancy laws, then found in every body of British or American statutes. These laws Southern legislatures copied, with what appeared to be necessary modifications, and these laws were soon assailed as evidence of an intent to reduce the negro again to slavery. Mr. James G. Blaine, in his "Twenty Years," selected the Alabama statutes for his attack. In the writer's book, "Why the Solid South," pp. 31-36, the Alabama statutes cited by Mr. Blaine are shown to be very similar to and largely copied from the statutes of Vermont, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island.
Had Mr. Lincoln been living he would have sympathized with these Southern law-makers in their difficult task. But to the radicals in Congress nothing could have been satisfactory that did not give Mr. Sumner's party the "allies it needed."
The first important step of the Congress that convened December 4, 1865, was to refuse admission to the congressmen from the States reconstructed under the Lincoln-Johnson plan, and pass a joint resolution for the appointment of a Committee of Fifteen to inquire into conditions in those States.
The temper of that Congress may be gauged by the following extract from the speech of Mr. Shellabarger, of Ohio, on the passage of the joint resolution:
"They framed iniquity and universal murder into law.... Their pirates burned your unarmed commerce on the sea. They carved the bones of your dead heroes into ornaments, and drank from goblets made out of their skulls. They poisoned your fountains; put mines under your soldiers' prisons; organized bands, whose leaders were concealed in your homes; and commissions ordered the torch and yellow fever to be carried to your cities and to your women and children. They planned one universal bonfire of the North from Lake Ontario to the Missouri," etc.
Congress, while refusing admission to senators elected by the legislatures of the reconstructed States, was permitting these very bodies to pass on amendments to the Federal Constitution; and such votes were counted. Congress now proposed the Fourteenth Amendment, Section III of which provided that no person should hold office under the United States who, having taken an oath, as a Federal or State officer, to support the Constitution, had subsequently engaged in the war against the Union. The Southerners would not vote for a provision that would disfranchise their leaders; they refused to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment, and this helped further to inflame the radicals of the North.
After the Committee of Fifteen had been appointed, Congress proceeded to put the reconstructed States under military control. In the debate on the measure, February 18, 1867, James A. Garfield, who was, at a later date, to become generous and conservative, said exultingly: "This bill sets out by laying its hands on the rebel governments and taking the very breath of life out of them; in the next place, it puts the bayonet at the breast of every rebel in the South; in the next place, it leaves in the hands of Congress utterly and absolutely the work of Reconstruction."
And Congress did its work. Lincoln was in his grave, and Johnson, even with his vetoes, was powerless. By the acts of March 2 and March 23, 1867, the reconstructed governments were swept away. Universal suffrage was given to the negro and most of the prominent whites were disfranchised.
The first suffrage bill was for the District of Columbia, during the debate on which Senator Sumner said: "Now, to my mind, nothing is clearer than the absolute necessity of suffrage for all colored persons in the disorganized States. It will not be enough, if you give it to those who can read and write; you will not in this way acquire the voting force you need there for the protection of Unionists, whether white or black. You will not acquire the new allies who are essential to the national cause."
In the forty-first Congress, beginning March 4, 1871, the twelve reconstructed States, including West Virginia, were represented by twenty-two Republicans and two Democrats in the Senate, and forty-eight Republicans and twelve Democrats in the House of Representatives.
Mr. Sumner's "new allies" were ready to answer to the roll-call.
When Congress had convened in December, 1865, its radical leaders were already bent on universal suffrage for the negro, but the Northern mind was not yet prepared for so radical a measure. The "Committee of Fifteen" was the first step in the programme, which was to hold the Southern States out of the Union and make an appeal to the passions and prejudices of Northern voters in the congressional elections of November, 1866. Valuable material for the coming campaign was already being furnished by the agents of the Freedmen's Bureau. These "adventurers, broken down preachers, and politicians," as Senator Fessenden, of Maine, called them, were, and had been for some time, reporting "outrages," swearing negroes into midnight leagues, and selecting the offices they hoped to fill.
But the chief source of the material relied upon in the congressional campaign of 1866 to exasperate the North, and prod voters to the point of sanctioning negro suffrage in the South, was the official information from the Committee of Fifteen. Its subcommittee of three, to take testimony as to Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas, were all Republicans. The doings of this subcommittee in Alabama illustrate their methods. Only five persons, who claimed to be citizens, were examined. These were all Republican politicians. The testimony of each was bitterly partisan. "Under the government of the State as it then existed, no one of these witnesses could hope for official preferment. When this Reconstruction plan had been completed the first of these five witnesses became governor of his State; the second became a senator in Congress; the third secured a life position in one of the departments in Washington; the fourth became a circuit judge in Alabama, and the fifth a judge of the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia—all as Republicans. There was no Democrat in the subcommittee which examined these gentlemen, to cross-examine them; and not a citizen of Alabama was called before that subcommittee to confute or explain their evidence."[93]
With the material gathered by these means and from these sources, the honest voters of the North were deluded into the election of a Congress that went to Washington, in December, 1866, armed with authority to pass the Reconstruction laws of March, 1867.
Southern counsels were now much divided. Many good men, like Governor Brown, of Georgia; General Longstreet and ex-Senator Albert Gallatin Brown, of Mississippi, advised acquiescence and assistance, "not because we approve the policy of Reconstruction, but because it is the best we can do." These advisers hoped that good men, well known to the negroes, might control them for the country's good; and zealous efforts were made along this line in every State, but they were futile. The blacks had already, before they got the suffrage, accepted the leadership of those claiming to be the "men who had freed them." These leaders were not only bureau agents but army camp-followers; and there was still another brood, who espied from afar a political Eden in the prostrate States and forthwith journeyed to it. All these Northern adventurers were called "carpet-baggers"—they carried their worldly goods in their hand-bags. The Southerners who entered into a joint-stock business with them became "scalawags." These people mustered the negroes into leagues, and everywhere whispered it into their ears that the aim of the Southern whites was to reënslave them.
Politics in the South in the days before the war had always been more or less intense, partly because there were so many who had leisure, and partly because the general rule was joint political discussions. The seams that had divided Whigs and Democrats, Secessionists and Union men, had not been entirely closed up, even by the melting fires of the Civil War. Old feuds for a time played their part in Southern politics, even after March, 1867. These old feuds made it difficult for Southern whites to get together as a race; and, in fact, conservative men dreaded the idea. It tended toward an actual race war which, for many years, had been a nightmare; but in every reconstructed State the negro and his allies finally forced the race issue.
The new rulers not only increased taxes and misappropriated the revenues of counties, cities, and States; they bartered away the credit of State after State. Some of the States, after they were redeemed, scaled their debts by compromising with creditors; others have struggled along with their increased burdens.
There were hundreds of negro policemen, constables, justices of the peace, and legislators who could not write their names. Justice was in many localities a farce. Ex-slaves became judges, representatives in Congress, and United States senators. The eleven Confederate States had been divided into military districts. Many of the officers and men who were scattered over the country to uphold negro rule sympathized with the whites and evidenced their sympathy in various ways. Others, either because they were radicals at heart, or to commend themselves to their superiors, who were some of them aspiring to political places, were super-serviceable; and it was not uncommon for a military officer, in a case where a negro was a party, to order a judge to leave the bench and himself take the place. In communities where negro majorities were overwhelming there were usually two factions, and when political campaigns were on agents for these clans often scoured the fields clear of laborers to recruit their marching bands. In cities these bands made night hideous with shouts and the noise of fifes and drums. The negro would tolerate no defection from his ranks to the whites, and negro women were more intolerant than the men. It sometimes happened that a bloody clash between the races was imminent when white men sought to protect a negro who had dared to speak in favor of the Democratic and Conservative party. In truth, the civilization of the South was being changed from white to negroid.
The final triumph of good government in all the States was at last accomplished by accepting the race issue, as in Alabama in 1874. The first resolution in the platform of the "Democratic and Conservative party" in that State then was, "The radical and dominant faction of the Republican party in this State persistently, and by fraudulent representations, have inflamed the passions and prejudices of the negroes, as a race, against the white people, and have thereby made it necessary for the white people to unite and act together in self-defence and for the preservation of white civilization."
The people of North Carolina recovered the right of self-government in 1870. Other States followed from time to time, the last two being Louisiana and South Carolina in 1877.
Edwin L. Godkin, who was for long at the head of the Nation and the Evening Post, of New York, is thought by some competent judges to have been the ablest editor this country has ever had. After the last of the negro governments set up in the South had passed away, looking back over the whole bad business, Mr. Godkin, in a letter to his friend Charles Eliot Norton, written from Sweet Springs, West Virginia, September 3, 1877, said: "I do not see in short how the negro is ever to be worked into a system of government for which you and I could have much respect."[94]
Garrison is dead. At the centenary of his birth, December 12, 1904, an effort was made to arouse enthusiasm. There was only a feeble response; but we still have extremists. Professor Josiah Royce, of Harvard, in "Race Questions" (1906), speaking of race antipathies as "trained hatred," says, pp. 48-49: "We can remember that they are childish phenomena in our lives, phenomena on a level with the dread of snakes or of mice, phenomena that we share with the cats and with the dogs, not noble phenomena, but caprices of our complex nature."
For now more than thirty years, whites and blacks, both free, have lived together in the reconstructed States. In some of them there have been local clashes, but in none of them has there been race war, predicted by Jefferson and feared by Lincoln; and there probably never will be such a war, unless it shall come through the intervention of such an outside force as produced in the South the conflict between the races at the polls in 1868-76.
Every State government set up under the plan of Congress had wrought ruin, and the ruin was always more complete where the negroes were most numerous, as in South Carolina and Louisiana.
The rule of the carpet-bagger and the negro was now superseded by governments based on Abraham Lincoln's idea, the idea he expressed in the debate with Douglas in 1858, when he said: "While they [the two races] do remain together there must be the position of inferior and superior, and I, as much as any other man, am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white man."
Conducted on this basis, the present governments in the reconstructed States have endured now for periods varying from thirty-six to forty-two years, and in every State, without any exception, the prosperity of both whites and blacks has been wonderful, and this in spite of the still existent abnormal animosities engendered by congressional reconstruction.
In the present State governments the race problem seems to have reached, in its larger lines, its only practicable solution. There is still, however, much friction between whites and blacks. Higher culture among the masses, especially of the dominant race, and wise leadership in both races, will in time minimize this, but it is not to be expected, nor is it ever to be desired, that racial antipathies should entirely cease to exist. The result of such cessation would be amalgamation, a solution that American whites will never tolerate.
Deportation, as a solution of the negro problem, is impracticable. Mr. Lincoln, much as he desired the separation of the races, could not accomplish it, even when he had all the war power of the government in his hands. He was, as we have seen, unable to find a country that would take the 3,500,000 of blacks then in the seceded States. Now, there are in the South, including Delaware, according to the census of 1910, 8,749,390, and, quite naturally, the American negro is more unwilling than ever to leave America.
Another solution sometimes suggested in the South is the repeal of the Fifteenth Amendment, which declares that the negro shall not be deprived of the ballot because of his race, but agitation for this would appear to be worse than useless.
The negro vote in the reconstructed States is, and has for years been, quite small, not large enough to be considered a factor in any of them. One cause of this is that the whites enforce against the blacks rigidly the tests required by law, but the chief reason is, that the negro, who is qualified, does not often apply for registration. He finds work now more profitable than voting. He can not, he knows, control, nor can he, if disposed to do so, sell his ballot as he once did. One of the most signal and durable evils of Congressional Reconstruction was the utter debasement of the suffrage in eleven States where the ballot had formerly been notably pure. Gideon Welles saw clearly when he said in his diary, June 23, 1867 (p. 102, vol. III): "Under the pretence of elevating the negro the radicals are degrading the whites and debasing the elective franchise, bringing elections into contempt." During the rule of the negro and the alien, in every black county, where the negro majority was as two to one, there were, as a rule, two Republican candidates for every fat office, and an election meant, for the negro, a golden harvest. Rival candidates were mercilessly fleeced by their black constituencies, and the belief South is that as a rule the carpet-baggers, in their hegira, returned North as poor as when they came.
In the Reconstruction era the whites fought fraud with fraud; and even after recovering control they, the whites, felt justified in continuing to defraud the negro of his vote. To restore the purity of the ballot-box was the chief reason for the amendments to State constitutions, by means of which amendments, having in view the limitations of the Federal Constitution, as many negroes and as few whites as was practicable were excluded.
This accounts in part for the smallness of the negro vote South. A more potent reason is that the Democratic party, dominated by whites, selects its candidates in primaries; and the negro, seeing no chance to win, does not care to pay a poll tax or otherwise qualify for registration.
Southern whites have now for more than three decades been governing the blacks in their midst. It is the most difficult task that has ever been undertaken in all the history of popular government, but sad experience has demonstrated that legal restriction of the negro vote in the South there must be.
Party spirit tends always to blind the vision, and, as we have seen in this review of the past, it often stifles conscience; and this even where the masses of the people are approximately homogeneous. Southern statesmen are now dealing not only with party spirit, but with perpetual race friction manifesting itself in various forms. Failure there must be in minor matters and in certain localities; the progress that has been made can only be fairly estimated by considering general results. Those who sympathize with the South think they see there among the whites a growing spirit of altruism, begotten of responsibility, and this promises much for the amelioration of race friction.
Since obtaining control of their State governments the whites in the Southern States have as a rule increased appropriations for common schools by at least four hundred per cent, and though paying themselves by far the greater proportion of these taxes, they have continued to divide revenues pro rata between the white and colored schools.
Industrial results have been amazing. The following figures, taken from the Annual Blue Book, 1911 edition, of the Manufacturers' Record, Baltimore, Maryland, include West Virginia among the reconstructed States.
The population of these States was, in 1880, 13,608,703; in 1910, 23,613,533.
Manufacturing capital, 1880, $147,156,624. In 1900—twenty years—it was $1,019,056,200.
Cotton crop, whole South, 1880, 5,761,252 bales. In 1911 it was about 15,000,000.
Of this cotton crop Southern mills took, in 1880, 321,337 bales, and in 1910, 2,344,343 bales.
In 1880 the twelve reconstructed States cut, of lumber, board measure, 2,981,274,000 feet; and in 1909 22,445,000,000 feet.
Their output of pig-iron was, in 1880, 264,991 long tons; in 1910, 3,048,000 tons. The assessed value of taxable property was, in 1880, $2,106,971,271; in 1910, $6,522,195,139.
The negro, though the white man, with his superior energy and capacity, far outstrips him, has shared in this material prosperity. His property in these States has been estimated as high as $500,000,000.
During the last decade, 1900-1910, the white population of the South increased by 24.4 per cent, while the negro population in the same States increased only 10.4 per cent. There has been a very considerable gain of whites over blacks since 1880, the result largely of a greater natural increase of whites over blacks, immigrants not counted. All this indicates that the negro problem is gradually being minimized.
Taken in the aggregate, the shortcomings of the negro are numerous and regrettable, but not greater than was to be expected. The general advance of an inferior race will never equal that of one which is superior by nature and already centuries ahead. The laggard and thriftless among the inferior people will naturally be more, and it is from these classes that prison houses are filled.
There is a very considerable class of negroes who are improving mentally and morally, but improvidence is a characteristic of the race, and very many of them, even though they labor more or less steadily, will never accumulate. The third class, much larger than among the whites, is composed of those who are idle, dissipated, and criminal. Taken altogether, however, what Booker Washington says is true: "There cannot be found, in the civilized or uncivilized world, a like number of negroes whose economic, educational, and religious life is so far advanced as that of the ten millions within this country."[95] This advancement is one of the results of slavery. When the negroes come to recognize this, as some of their leaders already do,[96] and come to appreciate the advantages for further improvement they have had since their emancipation, they will cease to repine over the bondage of their ancestors. There were undoubtedly evils in slavery, but, after all, there was some reason in the advice given by the good Spanish Bishop Las Casas to the King of Spain—that it would be rightful to enslave and thus Christianize and civilize the African savage. Herbert Spencer, "Illustrations of Universal Progress" (p. 444), says: "Hateful though it is to us, and injurious as it would be now, slavery was once beneficial, was one of the necessary phases of human progress."
Sir Harry Johnston, African explorer and student of the negro race, in both the old and the new world, and perhaps the most eminent authority on a question he has, in a fashion, made his own, says: "Intellectually, and perhaps physically, he (the negro) has attained the highest degree of advancement as yet in the United States."[97]
"In Alabama (most of all) the American negro is seen at his best, as peasant, peasant proprietor, artisan, professional man, and member of society."[98]
Race animosities are now abnormal, both South and North. The prime reasons for this are two:
1. The bitter conflict during reconstruction for race supremacy and the false hopes once held out to the negro of ultimate social equality with the whites. Among the early measures of congressional reconstruction was a "civil rights" enactment which the negroes regarded as giving to them all the rights of the white man. Their Supreme Court in Alabama decided, in "Burns vs. The State," that the "civil rights" laws conferred the right to intermarriage. Negroes, North, no doubt also believed in this construction. But the Supreme Court of the United States later held that the States, and not Congress, had jurisdiction over the marriage relation within the States. All the Southern and a number of the Northern States have since forbidden the intermarriage of whites and blacks, and so the negro's hopes of equal rights in this regard have vanished.
This disappointment and his utter failure to secure the social equality that once seemed his, have tended to embitter the negro against the white man.
2. Whites have been embittered against blacks by the frequency in later years of the crime of the negro against white women. This horrible offence began to be common in the South some thirty-two or three years since, or perhaps a little earlier, and somewhat later it appeared in the North, where it seems to have been as common, negro population considered, as in the South. The crime was almost invariably followed by lynching, which, however, was not always for the same crime. The following is the list of lynchings in the sections, as kept by the Chicago Tribune since it began to compile them: