Henry steele commager who is loyal to america

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What was “Fordism” and how did workers respond to it?

1. Read Textbook: Foner, Give Me Liberty, ("The Progressive Era, 1900-1916 [start of chapter] to "The Expanding Role of Government" [end of chapter])

An American History has gone through three editions and been adopted for use in survey courses at close to one thousand two- and four-year colleges in the United States, as well as a good number overseas. Of course, I am extremely gratified by this response. The book offers students a clear narra- tive of American history from the earliest days of European exploration and conquest of the New World to the first decade of the twenty-first century. Its central theme is the changing contours of American freedom. The comments I have received from instructors and students encour- age me to think that Give Me Liberty! has worked well in the classroom. These comments have also included many valuable suggestions, ranging from corrections of typographical and factual errors to thoughts about subjects that need more extensive treatment. In preparing new editions of the book I have tried to take these suggestions into account, as well as incorporating the insights of recent historical scholarship. Since the original edition was written, I have frequently been asked to produce a more succinct version of the textbook, which now runs to some 1,200 pages. This Brief Edition is a response to these requests. The text of the current volume is about one-third shorter than the full version. The result, I believe, is a book more suited to use in one-semester survey courses, classes x x Preface where the instructor wishes to supplement the text with additional read- ings, and in other situations where a briefer volume is desirable. Since some publishers have been known to assign the task of reduction in cases like this to editors rather than the actual author, I wish to empha- size that I did all the cutting and necessary rewriting for this Brief Edition myself. My guiding principle was to preserve the coverage, structure, and emphases of the regular edition and to compress the book by eliminating details of secondary importance, streamlining the narrative of events, and avoiding unnecessary repetition. While the book is significantly shorter, no subject treated in the full edition has been eliminated entirely and noth- ing essential, I believe, has been sacrificed. The sequence of chapters and subjects remains the same, and the freedom theme is present and operative throughout. In abridging the textbook I have retained the original interpretive framework as well as the new emphases added when the second and third editions of the book were published. The second edition incorporated new material about the history of Native Americans, an area of American his- tory that has been the subject of significant new scholarship in the past few years. It also devoted greater attention to the history of immigration and the controversies surrounding it—issues of considerable relevance to Amer- ican social and political life today. The most significant change in the third edition reflected my desire to place American history more fully in a global context. In the past few years, scholars writing about the American past have sought to delineate the influ- ences of the United States on the rest of the world as well as the global devel- opments that have helped to shape the course of events here at home. They have also devoted greater attention to transnational processes—the expan- sion of empires, international labor migrations, the rise and fall of slavery, the globalization of economic enterprise—that cannot be understood solely within the confines of one country’s national boundaries. Without seek- ing in any way to homogenize the history of individual nations or neglect the domestic forces that have shaped American development, this edition retains this emphasis. The most significant changes in this Fourth Edition reflect my desire to integrate more fully into the narrative the history of American religion. Today, this is a thriving subfield of American historical writing, partly because of the increased prominence in our own time of debates over the relations between government and religion and over the definition of reli- gious liberty—issues that are deeply rooted in the American experience. The Brief Edition also employs a bright new design for the text and its various elements. The popular Voices of Freedom feature—a pair of excerpts from primary source documents in each chapter that illuminate divergent inter- pretations of freedom—is present here. So too are the useful chapter opening P r e f a c e x x i focus questions, which appear in the running heads of the relevant text pages as well. There are chapter opening chronologies and end-of- chapter review pages with questions and key terms. As a new feature in the Brief Edition there are marginal glosses in the text pages that are meant to highlight key points and indicate the chapter structure for students. They are also useful means for review. The Brief Edition features more than 400 illustrations and over 100 captioned maps in easy to read four-color renditions. The Fur- ther Readings sections appear in the Appendix along with the Glossary and the collection of key documents. The Brief Edition is fully supported by the same array of print and electronic supplements that support the other edi- tions of Give Me Liberty! These materials have been revised to match the con- tent of the Brief Edition. Americans have always had a divided attitude toward history. On the one hand, they tend to be remarkably future-oriented, dismissing events of even the recent past as “ancient history” and sometimes seeing history as a bur- den to be overcome, a prison from which to escape. On the other hand, like many other peoples, Americans have always looked to history for a sense of personal or group identity and of national cohesiveness. This is why so many Americans devote time and energy to tracing their family trees and why they visit historical museums and National Park Service historical sites in ever-increasing numbers. My hope is that this book will help to con- vince readers with all degrees of interest that history does matter to them. The novelist and essayist James Baldwin once observed that history “does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, . . . [that] history is literally present in all that we do.” As Baldwin recognized, the power of history is evident in our own world. Especially in a political democracy like the United States, whose government is designed to rest on the consent of informed citizens, knowledge of the past is essential—not only for those of us whose profession is the teaching and writing of history, but for everyone. History, to be sure, does not offer simple lessons or imme- diate answers to current questions. Knowing the history of immigration to the United States, and all of the tensions, turmoil, and aspirations associated with it, for example, does not tell us what current immigration policy ought to be. But without that knowledge, we have no way of understanding which approaches have worked and which have not—essential information for the formulation of future public policy. History, it has been said, is what the present chooses to remember about the past. Rather than a fixed collection of facts, or a group of inter- pretations that cannot be challenged, our understanding of history is con- stantly changing. There is nothing unusual in the fact that each generation rewrites history to meet its own needs, or that scholars disagree among x x i i Preface themselves on basic questions like the causes of the Civil War or the rea- sons for the Great Depression. Precisely because each generation asks dif- ferent questions of the past, each generation formulates different answers. The past thirty years have witnessed a remarkable expansion of the scope of historical study. The experiences of groups neglected by earlier scholars, including women, African-Americans, working people, and others, have received unprecedented attention from historians. New subfields—social history, cultural history, and family history among them—have taken their place alongside traditional political and diplomatic history. Give Me Liberty! draws on this voluminous historical literature to pres- ent an up-to-date and inclusive account of the American past, paying due attention to the experience of diverse groups of Americans while in no way neglecting the events and processes Americans have experienced in common. It devotes serious attention to political, social, cultural, and eco- nomic history, and to their interconnections. The narrative brings together major events and prominent leaders with the many groups of ordinary peo- ple who make up American society. Give Me Liberty! has a rich cast of char- acters, from Thomas Jefferson to campaigners for woman suffrage, from Franklin D. Roosevelt to former slaves seeking to breathe meaning into emancipation during and after the Civil War. The unifying theme of freedom that runs through the text gives shape to the narrative and integrates the numerous strands that make up the American experience. This approach builds on that of my earlier book, The Story of American Freedom (1998), although Give Me Liberty! places events and personalities in the foreground and is more geared to the structure of the introductory survey course. Freedom, and battles to define its meaning, has long been central to my own scholarship and undergraduate teaching, which focuses on the nineteenth century and especially the era of Civil War and Reconstruction (1850–1877). This was a time when the future of slavery tore the nation apart and emancipation produced a national debate over what rights the former slaves, and all Americans, should enjoy as free citizens. I have found that attention to clashing definitions of freedom and the struggles of differ- ent groups to achieve freedom as they understood it offers a way of mak- ing sense of the bitter battles and vast transformations of that pivotal era. I believe that the same is true for American history as a whole. No idea is more fundamental to Americans’ sense of themselves as individuals and as a nation than freedom. The central term in our politi- cal language, freedom—or liberty, with which it is almost always used interchangeably—is deeply embedded in the record of our history and the language of everyday life. The Declaration of Independence lists liberty among mankind’s inalienable rights; the Constitution announces its pur- pose as securing liberty’s blessings. The United States fought the Civil War P r e f a c e x x i i i to bring about a new birth of freedom, World War II for the Four Freedoms, and the Cold War to defend the Free World. Americans’ love of liberty has been represented by liberty poles, liberty caps, and statues of liberty, and acted out by burning stamps and burning draft cards, by running away from slavery, and by demonstrating for the right to vote. “Every man in the street, white, black, red or yellow,” wrote the educator and statesman Ralph Bunche in 1940, “knows that this is ‘the land of the free’ . . . ‘the cradle of liberty.’” The very universality of the idea of freedom, however, can be mislead- ing. Freedom is not a fixed, timeless category with a single unchanging defi- nition. Indeed, the history of the United States is, in part, a story of debates, disagreements, and struggles over freedom. Crises like the American Revo- lution, the Civil War, and the Cold War have permanently transformed the idea of freedom. So too have demands by various groups of Americans to enjoy greater freedom. The meaning of freedom has been constructed not only in congressional debates and political treatises, but on plantations and picket lines, in parlors and even bedrooms. Over the course of our history, American freedom has been both a real- ity and a mythic ideal—a living truth for millions of Americans, a cruel mockery for others. For some, freedom has been what some scholars call a “habit of the heart,” an ideal so taken for granted that it is lived out but rarely analyzed. For others, freedom is not a birthright but a distant goal that has inspired great sacrifice. Give Me Liberty! draws attention to three dimensions of freedom that have been critical in American history: (1) the meanings of freedom; (2) the social conditions that make freedom possible; and (3) the boundaries of free- dom that determine who is entitled to enjoy freedom and who is not. All have changed over time. In the era of the American Revolution, for example, freedom was pri- marily a set of rights enjoyed in public activity—including the right of a com- munity to be governed by laws to which its representatives had consented and of individuals to engage in religious worship without governmental interference. In the nineteenth century, freedom came to be closely identi- fied with each person’s opportunity to develop to the fullest his or her innate talents. In the twentieth, the “ability to choose,” in both public and private life, became perhaps the dominant understanding of freedom. This develop- ment was encouraged by the explosive growth of the consumer marketplace which offered Americans an unprecedented array of goods with which to satisfy their needs and desires. During the 1960s, a crucial chapter in the history of American freedom, the idea of personal freedom was extended into virtually every realm, from attire and “lifestyle” to relations between the sexes. Thus, over time, more and more areas of life have been drawn into Americans’ debates about the meaning of freedom. x x i v Preface A second important dimension of freedom focuses on the social con- ditions necessary to allow freedom to flourish. What kinds of economic institutions and relationships best encourage individual freedom? In the colonial era and for more than a century after independence, the answer centered on economic autonomy, enshrined in the glorification of the inde- pendent small producer—the farmer, skilled craftsman, or shopkeeper— who did not have to depend on another person for his livelihood. As the industrial economy matured, new conceptions of economic freedom came to the fore: “liberty of contract” in the Gilded Age, “industrial freedom” (a say in corporate decision making) in the Progressive era, economic security during the New Deal, and, more recently, the ability to enjoy mass consump- tion within a market economy. The boundaries of freedom, the third dimension of this theme, have inspired some of the most intense struggles in American history. Although founded on the premise that liberty is an entitlement of all humanity, the United States for much of its history deprived many of its own people of free- dom. Non-whites have rarely enjoyed the same access to freedom as white Americans. The belief in equal opportunity as the birthright of all Ameri- cans has coexisted with persistent efforts to limit freedom by race, gender, class, and in other ways. Less obvious, perhaps, is the fact that one person’s freedom has fre- quently been linked to another’s servitude. In the colonial era and nine- teenth century, expanding freedom for many Americans rested on the lack of freedom—slavery, indentured servitude, the subordinate position of women—for others. By the same token, it has been through battles at the boundaries—the efforts of racial minorities, women, and others to secure greater freedom—that the meaning and experience of freedom have been deepened and the concept extended into new realms. Time and again in American history, freedom has been transformed by the demands of excluded groups for inclusion. The idea of freedom as a universal birthright owes much to abolitionists who sought to extend the blessings of liberty to blacks and to immigrant groups who insisted on full recognition as American citizens. The principle of equal protection of the law without regard to race, which became a central element of American freedom, arose from the antislavery struggle and Civil War and was rein- vigorated by the civil rights revolution of the 1960s, which called itself the “freedom movement.” The battle for the right of free speech by labor radicals and birth control advocates in the first part of the twentieth century helped to make civil liberties an essential element of freedom for all Americans. Freedom is the oldest of clichés and the most modern of aspirations. At various times in our history, it has served as the rallying cry of the power- less and as a justification of the status quo. Freedom helps to bind our cul- ture together and exposes the contradictions between what America claims P r e f a c e x x v to be and what it sometimes has been. American history is not a narrative of continual progress toward greater and greater freedom. As the abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson noted after the Civil War, “revolutions may go backward.” While freedom can be achieved, it may also be taken away. This happened, for example, when the equal rights granted to former slaves immediately after the Civil War were essentially nullified during the era of segregation. As was said in the eighteenth century, the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. In the early twenty-first century, freedom continues to play a central role in our political and social life and thought. It is invoked by individuals and groups of all kinds, from critics of economic globalization to those who seek to export American freedom overseas. As with the longer version of the book, I hope that this Brief Edition of Give Me Liberty! will offer begin- ning students a clear account of the course of American history, and of its central theme, freedom, which today remains as varied, contentious, and ever-changing as America itself. x x v i Preface A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S All works of history are, to a considerable extent, collaborative books, in that every writer builds on the research and writing of previous scholars. This is especially true of a textbook that covers the entire American experience, over more than five centuries. My greatest debt is to the innumerable histo- rians on whose work I have drawn in preparing this volume. The Suggested Reading list in the Appendix offers only a brief introduction to the vast body of historical scholarship that has influenced and informed this book. More specifically, however, I wish to thank the following scholars, who gener- ously read portions of this work and offered valuable comments, criticisms, and suggestions: Wayne Ackerson, Salisbury University Mary E. Adams, City College of San Francisco Jeff Adler, University of Florida David Anderson, Louisiana Tech University John Barr, Lone Star College, Kingwood Lauren Braun-Strumfels, Raritan Valley Community College James Broussard, Lebanon Valley College Michael Bryan, Greenville Technical College Stephanie Cole, The University of Texas at Arlington Ashley Cruseturner, McLennan Community College Jim Dudlo, Brookhaven College Beverly Gage, Yale University Monica Gisolfi, University of North Carolina, Wilmington Adam Goudsouzian, University of Memphis Mike Green, Community College of Southern Nevada Vanessa Gunther, California State University, Fullerton David E. Hamilton, University of Kentucky Brian Harding, Mott Community College Sandra Harvey, Lone Star College–Cy Fair April Holm, University of Mississippi David Hsiung, Juniata College James Karmel, Harford Community College Kelly Knight, Penn State University Marianne Leeper, Trinity Valley Community College Jeffrey K. Lucas, University of North Carolina at Pembroke Tina Margolis, Westchester Community College Kent McGaughy, HCC Northwest College James Mills, University of Texas, Brownsville Gil Montemayor, McLennan Community College Jonathan Noyalas, Lord Fairfax Community College Robert M. O’Brien, Lone Star College–Cy Fair P r e f a c e x x v i i Joseph Palermo, California State University, Sacramento Ann Plane, University of California, Santa Barbara Nancy Marie Robertson, Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis Esther Robinson, Lone Star College–Cy Fair Richard Samuelson, California State University, San Bernadino Diane Sager, Maple Woods Community College John Shaw, Portland Community College Mark Spencer, Brock University David Stebenne, Ohio State University Judith Stein, City College, City University of New York George Stevens, Duchess Community College Robert Tinkler, California State University, Chico Elaine Thompson, Louisiana Tech University David Weiman, Barnard College William Young, Maple Woods Community College I am particularly grateful to my colleagues in the Columbia University Department of History: Pablo Piccato, for his advice on Latin American his- tory; Evan Haefeli and Ellen Baker, who read and made many suggestions for improvements in their areas of expertise (colonial America and the history of the West, respectively); and Sarah Phillips, who offered advice on treating the history of the environment. I am also deeply indebted to the graduate students at Columbia Univer- sity’s Department of History who helped with this project. Theresa Ventura offered invaluable assistance in gathering material for the new sections plac- ing American history in a global context. April Holm provided similar assis- tance for new coverage in this edition of the history of American religion and debates over religious freedom. James Delbourgo conducted research for the chapters on the colonial era. Beverly Gage did the same for the twenti- eth century. Daniel Freund provided all-round research assistance. Victoria Cain did a superb job of locating images. I also want to thank my colleagues Elizabeth Blackmar and Alan Brinkley for offering advice and encourage- ment throughout the writing of this book. Many thanks to Joshua Brown, director of the American Social History Project, whose website, History Matters, lists innumerable online resources for the study of American history. Nancy Robertson at IUIPUI did a superb job revising and enhancing the in-book pedagogy. Monica Gisolfi (Univer- sity of North Carolina, Wilmington) and Robert Tinkler (California State University, Chico) did excellent work on the Instructor’s Manual and Test Bank. Kathleen Thomas (University of Wisconsin, Stout) helped greatly in the revisions of the companion media packages. x x v i i i Preface At W. W. Norton & Company, Steve Forman was an ideal editor— patient, encouraging, and always ready to offer sage advice. I would also like to thank Steve’s assistants, Justin Cahill and Penelope Lin, for their indispensable and always cheerful help on all aspects of the project; Ellen Lohman and Debbie Nichols for their careful copyediting and proof read- ing work. Stephanie Romeo and Donna Ranieri for their resourceful atten- tion to the illustrations program; Hope Miller Goodell and Chin-Yee Lai for their refinements of the book design; Mike Fodera and Debra Morton-Hoyt for splendid work on the covers for the Fourth Edition; Kim Yi for keep- ing the many threads of the project aligned and then tying them together; Sean Mintus for his efficiency and care in book production; Steve Hoge for orchestrating the rich media package that accompanies the textbook; Jessica Brannon-Wranosky, Texas A&M University–Commerce, our digital media author for the terrific new web quizzes and outlines; Volker Janssen, Cali- fornia State University, Fullerton, for the helpful new online reading exer- cises; Nicole Netherton, Steve Dunn, and Mike Wright for their alert reads of the U.S. survey market and their hard work in helping establish Give Me Liberty! within it; and Drake McFeely, Roby Harrington, and Julia Reidhead for maintaining Norton as an independent, employee-owned publisher ded- icated to excellence in its work. Many students may have heard stories of how publishing companies alter the language and content of textbooks in an attempt to maximize sales and avoid alienating any potential reader. In this case, I can honestly say that W. W. Norton allowed me a free hand in writing the book and, apart from the usual editorial corrections, did not try to influence its content at all. For this I thank them, while I accept full responsibility for the interpretations pre- sented and for any errors the book may contain. Since no book of this length can be entirely free of mistakes, I welcome readers to send me corrections at ef17@columbia.edu. My greatest debt, as always, is to my family—my wife, Lynn Garafola, for her good-natured support while I was preoccupied by a project that con- sumed more than its fair share of my time and energy, and my daughter, Daria, who while a ninth and tenth grader read every chapter as it was writ- ten and offered invaluable suggestions about improving the book’s clarity, logic, and grammar. Eric Foner New York City July 2013 P r e f a c e x x i x G I V E M E L I B E R T Y ! A N A M E R I C A N H I S T O R Y  B r i e f F o u r t h E d i t i o n 1865 Special Field Order 15 C H A P T E R 1 5 Freedmen’s Bureau established Lincoln assassinated; Andrew Johnson becomes president 1865– Presidential Reconstruction 1867 Black Codes “ W H A T I S 1866 Civil Rights Bill Ku Klux Klan established 1867 Reconstruction Act of 1867 F R E E D O M ? ” Tenure of Office Act 1867– Radical Reconstruction 1877  1868 Impeachment and trial of President Johnson Fourteenth Amendment ratified R E C O N S T R U C T I O N , 1 8 6 5 – 1 8 7 7 1869 Inauguration of Ulysses S. Grant 1870 Hiram Revels, first black U.S. senator Fifteenth Amendment ratified 1870– Enforcement Acts 1871 1872 Liberal Republicans established 1873 Colfax Massacre Slaughterhouse Cases National economic depression begins 1876 United States v. Cruikshank 1877 Bargain of 1877 The Shackle Broken—by the Genius of Freedom. This 1874 lithograph depicts Robert B. Elliott, a black congressman from South Carolina, delivering celebrated speech supporting the bill that became the Civil Rights Act of 1875. F O C U S On the evening of January 12, 1865, less than a month after Union forces captured Savannah, Georgia, twenty leaders of the city’s black community gathered for a discussion with General William T. Sherman and Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton. The con- Q U E S T I O N S versation revealed that the black leaders brought out of slavery a clear definition of freedom. Asked what he understood by slavery, Garrison s Frazier, a Baptist minister chosen as the group’s spokesman, responded did the former slaves and that it meant one person’s “receiving by irresistible power the work of slaveholders pursue in the another man, and not by his consent.” Freedom he defined as “placing postwar South? us where we could reap the fruit of our own labor, and take care of our- selves.” The way to accomplish this was “to have land, and turn it and till s it by our own labor.” visions of Reconstruction? Sherman’s meeting with the black leaders foreshadowed some of the radical changes that would take place during the era known s as Reconstruction (meaning, literally, the rebuilding of the shattered political effects of Radi- nation). In the years following the Civil War, former slaves and their cal Reconstruction in the white allies, North and South, would seek to redefine the meaning and South? boundaries of American freedom. Previously an entitlement of whites, freedom would be expanded to include black Americans. The laws and s Constitution would be rewritten to guarantee African-Americans, for tors, in both the North and the first time in the nation’s history, recognition as citizens and equality South, for the abandon- before the law. Black men would be granted the right to vote, ushering ment of Reconstruction? in a period of interracial democracy throughout the South. Black schools, churches, and other institutions would flourish, laying the foundation for the modern African-American community. Many of the advances of Reconstruction would prove temporary, swept away during a campaign of violence in the South and the North’s retreat from the ideal of equal- ity. But Reconstruction laid the foundation for future struggles to extend freedom to all Americans. Four days after the meeting, Sherman responded to the black delegation by issuing Special Field Order 15. This set aside the Sea Islands and a large area along the South Carolina and Georgia coasts for the settlement of black families on forty-acre plots of land. He also offered them broken-down mules that the army could no longer use. In Sherman’s order lay the origins of the phrase, “forty acres and a mule,” which would reverberate across the South in the next few years. Among the emancipated slaves, Sherman’s order raised hopes that the end of slavery would be accompanied by the economic independence that they, like other Americans, believed essential to genuine freedom. 442 C h a p t e r 1 5  “What Is Freedom?” What visions of freedom did the former slaves and slaveholders pursue in the postwar South? T H E M E A N I N G O F F R E E D O M “What is freedom?” asked Congressman James A. Garfield in 1865. “Is it the bare privilege of not being chained? If this is all, then freedom is a bitter mockery, a cruel delusion.” Did freedom mean simply the absence of slavery, or did it imply other rights for the former slaves, and if so, which ones? Equal civil rights, the vote, ownership of property? During Reconstruction, freedom became a terrain of conflict, its substance open to different, often contradictory interpretations. Conflicts over freedom African-Americans’ understanding of freedom was shaped by their experiences as slaves and their observation of the free society around them. To begin with, freedom meant escaping the numerous injustices of slavery—punishment by the lash, the separation of families, denial of access to education, the sexual exploitation of black women by their owners—and sharing in the rights and opportunities of American citizens. “If I cannot do like a white man,” Henry Adams, an emancipated slave in Family Record, a lithograph marketed Louisiana, told his former master in 1865, “I am not free.” to former slaves after the Civil War, centers on an idealized portrait of a middle-class black family, with scenes of slavery and freedom. F a m i l i e s i n F r e e d o m With slavery dead, institutions that had existed before the war, like the black family, free blacks’ churches and schools, and the secret slave church, were strength- ened, expanded, and freed from white supervision. The family was central to the postemancipation black community. Former slaves made remarkable efforts to locate loved ones from whom they had been separated under slavery. One northern reporter in 1865 encoun- tered a freedman who had walked more than 600 miles from Georgia to North Carolina, searching for the wife and children from whom he had been sold away before the war. While freedom helped to stabilize family life, it also subtly altered relationships within the family. Immediately after the Civil War, planters complained that freedwomen had “withdrawn” from field labor and work as house servants. Many black women preferred to devote more time to their families than had been pos- sible under slavery, and men considered it a badge of T H E M E A N I N G O F F R E E D O M 443 honor to see their wives remain at home. Eventually, the dire poverty of the black community would compel a far higher proportion of black women than white women to go to work for wages. C h u r c h a n d S c h o o l At the same time, blacks abandoned white-controlled religious institutions to create churches of their own. On the eve of the Civil War, 42,000 black Methodists worshiped in biracial South Carolina churches; by the end of Reconstruction, only 600 remained. As the major institution independent of white control, the church Five Generations of a Black Family, played a central role in the black community. A place of worship, it also an 1862 photograph that suggests housed schools, social events, and political gatherings. Black ministers the power of family ties among came to play a major role in politics. Some 250 held public office during emancipated slaves. Reconstruction. Another striking example of the freedpeople’s quest for individual and community improvement was their desire for education. The thirst for learn- ing sprang from many sources—a desire to read the Bible, the need to prepare for the economic marketplace, and the opportunity, which arose in 1867, to take part in politics. Blacks of all ages flocked to the schools established by Mother and Daughter Reading, Mt. Meigs, Alabama, an 1890 northern missionary societies, the Freedmen’s Bureau, and groups of ex- photograph by Rudolph Eickemeyer. slaves themselves. Reconstruction also witnessed the creation of the nation’s During Reconstruction and for years first black colleges, including Fisk University in Tennessee, Hampton thereafter, former slaves exhibited Institute in Virginia, and Howard University in the nation’s capital. a deep desire for education, and learning took place outside of school as well as within. P o l i t i c a l F r e e d o m In a society that had made political participation a core element of freedom, the right to vote inevitably became central to the former slaves’ desire for empowerment and equality. As Frederick Douglass put it soon after the South’s surrender in 1865, “Slavery is not abolished until the black man has the ballot.” In a “monarchial government,” Douglass explained, no “special” disgrace applied to those denied the right to vote. But in a democ- racy, “where universal suffrage is the rule,” excluding any group meant branding them with “the stigma of inferiority.” Anything less than full citizenship, black spokesmen insisted, would betray the nation’s democratic promise and the war’s meaning. To demon- strate their patriotism, blacks throughout the South organized Fourth of July celebrations. For years after the Civil War, white southerners would 444 C h a p t e r 1 5  “What Is Freedom?” What visions of freedom did the former slaves and slaveholders pursue in the postwar South? The First African Church, Richmond, as depicted in Harper’s Weekly, June 27, 1874. The establishment of independent black churches was an enduring accomplishment of Reconstruction. “shut themselves within doors” on Independence Day, as a white resident of Charleston recorded in her diary, while former slaves commemorated the holiday themselves. L a n d , L a b o r , a n d F r e e d o m Like those of rural people throughout the world, former slaves’ ideas of freedom were directly related to landownership. On the land they would Freedom and landownership develop independent communities free of white control. Many former slaves insisted that through their unpaid labor, they had acquired a right to the land. “The property which they hold,” declared an Alabama black con- vention, “was nearly all earned by the sweat of our brows.” In some parts of the South, blacks in 1865 seized property, insisting that it belonged to them. In its individual elements and much of its language, former slaves’ definition of freedom resembled that of white Americans—self-ownership, Freedom’s meaning for former slaves family stability, religious liberty, political participation, and economic autonomy. But these elements combined to form a vision very much their own. For whites, freedom, no matter how defined, was a given, a birthright to be defended. For African-Americans, it was an open-ended process, a transformation of every aspect of their lives and of the society and cul- ture that had sustained slavery in the first place. Although the freedpeople failed to achieve full freedom as they understood it, their definition did much to shape national debate during the turbulent era of Reconstruction. M a s t e r s w i t h o u t S l a v e s Most white southerners reacted to military defeat and emancipation with The southern white reaction to dismay, not only because of the widespread devastation but also because emancipation they must now submit to northern demands. “The demoralization is T H E M E A N I N G O F F R E E D O M 445 Two maps of the Barrow plantation illustrate the effects of emancipation T H E B A R R O W P L A N T A T I O N on rural life in the South. In 1860, 1860 1881 slaves lived in communal quarters near the owner’s house. Twenty years later, former slaves working as Sabrina sharecroppers lived scattered across Dalton the plantation and had their own Lizzie Dalton iver iver church and school. Frank Maxey Joe Bug Jim Reid ittle R ittle R L W L r Wr Nancy Pope ig i h g t h 's t 's Cane Pope B Church r B an Gus Barrow ra c School Willis n h c Bryant h Gin House Lem Bryant Gin House Lewis Watson Tom Wright Reuben Barrow Ben Thomas Omy Barrow "Granny" Slave Peter Tom Landlord’s Quarters Master's Barrow Thomas House House Milly Barrow Handy Barrow Old Isaac Calvin Tom Tang Branch Creek Parker Branch Creek Beckton Barrow Syll's Fork Syll's Fork Lem Douglas complete,” wrote a Georgia girl. “We are whipped, there is no doubt about it.” The appalling loss of life, a disaster without parallel in the American Confederate deaths experience, affected all classes of southerners. Nearly 260,000 men died for the Confederacy—more than one-fifth of the South’s adult male white population. The widespread destruction of work animals, farm buildings, and machinery ensured that economic revival would be slow and painful. In 1870, the value of property in the South, not counting that represented by slaves, was 30 percent lower than before the war. Planter families faced profound changes in the war’s aftermath. Many Planters lost not only their slaves but their life savings, which they had patrioti- cally invested in now-worthless Confederate bonds. Some, whose slaves departed the plantation, for the first time found themselves compelled to do physical labor. Southern planters sought to implement an understanding of freedom quite different from that of the former slaves. As they struggled to accept the reality of emancipation, most planters defined black freedom in the narrowest manner. As journalist Sidney Andrews discovered late in 1865, “The whites seem wholly unable to comprehend that freedom for the negro means the same thing as freedom for them.” 446 C h a p t e r 1 5  “What Is Freedom?” What visions of freedom did the former slaves and slaveholders pursue in the postwar South? T h e F r e e L a b o r V i s i o n Along with former slaves and former masters, the victorious Republican North tried to implement its own vision of freedom. Central to its defini- tion was the antebellum principle of free labor, now further strengthened as a definition of the good society by the Union’s triumph. In the free labor Free labor and the good society vision of a reconstructed South, emancipated blacks, enjoying the same opportunities for advancement as northern workers, would labor more productively than they had as slaves. At the same time, northern capital and migrants would energize the economy. The South would eventually come to resemble the “free society” of the North, complete with public schools, small towns, and independent farmers. With planters seeking to establish a labor system as close to slavery as possible, and former slaves demanding economic autonomy and access to land, a long period of conflict over the organization and control of labor followed on plantations throughout the South. It fell to the Freedmen’s Winslow Homer’s 1876 painting , A Bureau, an agency established by Congress in March 1865, to attempt to Visit from the Old Mistress, depicts an imaginary meeting between a establish a working free labor system. southern white woman and her former slaves. Their stance and gaze suggest the tensions arising from the birth T h e F r e e d m e n ’ s B u r e a u of a new social order. Homer places his subjects on an equal footing, Under the direction of O. O. Howard, a graduate of Bowdoin College in yet maintains a space of separation Maine and a veteran of the Civil War, the bureau took on responsibilities between them. He exhibited the that can only be described as daunting. The bureau was an experiment in painting to acclaim at the Paris government social policy that seems to belong more comfortably to the Universal Exposition in 1878. New Deal of the 1930s or the Great Society of the 1960s (see Chapters 21 and 25, respec- tively) than to nineteenth-century America. Bureau agents were supposed to establish schools, provide aid to the poor and aged, settle disputes between whites and blacks and among the freedpeople, and secure for former slaves and white Unionists equal treatment before the courts. “It is not . . . in your power to fulfill one-tenth of the expec- tations of those who framed the Bureau,” General William T. Sherman wrote to Howard. “I fear you have Hercules’ task.” The bureau lasted from 1865 to 1870. Even at its peak, there were fewer than T H E M E A N I N G O F F R E E D O M 447 The Freedmen’s Bureau, an engraving from Harper’s Weekly, July 25, 1868, depicts the bureau agent as a promoter of racial peace in the violent postwar South. Achievements of the 1,000 agents in the entire South. Nonetheless, the bureau’s achievements Freedmen’s Bureau in some areas, notably education and health care, were striking. By 1869, nearly 3,000 schools, serving more than 150,000 pupils in the South, reported to the bureau. Bureau agents also ran hospitals established dur- ing the war and provided medical care and drugs to both black and white southerners. T h e F a i l u r e o f L a n d R e f o r m One provision of the law establishing the bureau gave it the authority to divide abandoned and confiscated land into forty-acre plots for rental and eventual sale to the former slaves. In the summer of 1865, however, President Andrew Johnson and land Andrew Johnson, who had succeeded Lincoln, ordered nearly all land in reform federal hands returned to its former owners. A series of confrontations followed, notably in South Carolina and Georgia, where the army forcibly evicted blacks who had settled on “Sherman land.” When O. O. Howard, head of the Freedmen’s Bureau, traveled to the Sea Islands to inform blacks of the new policy, he was greeted with disbelief and protest. A committee of former slaves drew up petitions to Howard and President Johnson. Land, the freedmen insisted, was essential to the meaning of freedom. Without it, they declared, “we have not bettered our condition” from the days of slavery—“you will see, this is not the condition of really free men.” Because no land distribution took place, the vast majority of rural freedpeople remained poor and without property during Reconstruction. 448 C h a p t e r 1 5  “What Is Freedom?” What visions of freedom did the former slaves and slaveholders pursue in the postwar South? They had no alternative but to work on white-owned plantations, often for their former owners. Far from being able to rise in the social scale through hard work, black men were largely confined to farm work, unskilled labor, and service jobs, and black women to positions in pri- vate homes as cooks and maids. The failure of land reform produced a deep sense of betrayal that survived among the former slaves and their descendants long after the end of Reconstruction. “No sir,” Mary Gaffney, an elderly ex-slave, recalled in the 1930s, “we were not given a thing but freedom.” Out of the conflict on the plantations, new systems of labor emerged in the different regions of the South. Sharecropping came to dominate the Cotton Belt and much of the Tobacco Belt of Virginia and North Carolina. Sharecropping initially arose as a compromise between blacks’ desire for land and planters’ demand for labor discipline. The system allowed each A nursemaid and her charge, from a black family to rent a part of a plantation, with the crop divided between daguerreotype around 1865. worker and owner at the end of the year. Sharecropping guaranteed the planters a stable resident labor force. Former slaves preferred it to gang labor because it offered them the prospect of working without day-to- day white supervision. But as the years went on, sharecropping became more and more oppressive. Sharecroppers’ economic opportunities were severely limited by a world market in which the price of farm products suffered a prolonged decline. T h e W h i t e F a r m e r The plight of the small farmer was not confined to blacks in the postwar South. Wartime devastation set in motion a train of events that perma- nently altered the independent way of life of white yeomen, leading to what they considered a loss of freedom. To obtain supplies from mer- chants, farmers were forced to take up the growing of cotton and pledge a part of the crop as collateral (property the creditor can seize if a debt is not paid). This system became known as the “crop lien.” Since interest rates The crop-lien system were extremely high and the price of cotton fell steadily, many farmers found themselves still in debt after marketing their portion of the crop at year’s end. They had no choice but to continue to plant cotton to obtain new loans. By the mid-1870s, white farmers, who cultivated only 10 percent of the South’s cotton crop in 1860, were growing 40 percent, and many who had owned their land had fallen into dependency as sharecroppers who now rented land owned by others. Both black and white farmers found themselves caught in the share- The burden of debt cropping and crop-lien systems. The workings of sharecropping and the T H E M E A N I N G O F F R E E D O M 449 V O I C E S O F F R E E D O M F r o m P e t i t i o n o f C o m m i t t e e i n B e h a l f o f t h e F r e e d m e n t o A n d r e w J o h n s o n ( 1 8 6 5 ) In the summer of 1865, President Andrew Johnson ordered land that had been distributed to freed slaves in South Carolina and Georgia returned to its former owners. A committee of freedmen drafted a petition asking for the right to obtain land. Johnson did not, however, change his policy. We the freedmen of Edisto Island, South Carolina, have learned from you through Major General O. O. Howard . . . with deep sorrow and painful hearts of the possibility of [the] government restoring these lands to the former owners. We are well aware of the many perplexing and trying questions that burden your mind, and therefore pray to god (the preserver of all, and who has through our late and beloved President [Lincoln’s] proclamation and the war made us a free people) that he may guide you in making your decisions and give you that wisdom that cometh from above to settle these great and important questions for the best interests of the country and the colored race. Here is where secession was born and nurtured. Here is where we have toiled nearly all our lives as slaves and treated like dumb driven cattle. This is our home, we have made these lands what they were, we are the only true and loyal people that were found in possession of these lands. We have been always ready to strike for liberty and humanity, yea to fight if need be to preserve this glorious Union. Shall not we who are freedmen and have always been true to this Union have the same rights as are enjoyed by others? . . . Are not our rights as a free people and good citizens of these United States to be considered before those who were found in rebellion against this good and just government? . . . [Are] we who have been abused and oppressed for many long years not to be allowed the privilege of purchasing land but be subject to the will of these large land owners? God forbid. Land monopoly is injurious to the advancement of the course of freedom, and if government does not make some provision by which we as freedmen can obtain a homestead, we have not bettered our condition. . . . We look to you . . . for protection and equal rights with the privilege of purchasing a homestead—a homestead right here in the heart of South Carolina. 450 C h a p t e r 1 5  “What Is Freedom?” F r o m a S h a r e c r o p p i n g C o n t r a c t ( 1 8 6 6 ) Few former slaves were able to acquire land in the post–Civil War South. Most ended up as sharecroppers, working on white-owned land for a share of the crop at the end of the growing season. This contract, typical of thousands of others, originated in Tennessee. The laborers signed with an X, as they were illiterate. Thomas J. Ross agrees to employ the Freedmen to plant and raise a crop on his Rosstown Plantation. . . . On the following Rules, Regulations and Remunerations. The said Ross agrees to furnish the land to cultivate, and a sufficient number of mules & horses and feed them to make and house said crop and all necessary farming utensils to carry on the same and to give unto said Freedmen whose names appear below one half of all the cotton, corn and wheat that is raised on said place for the year 1866 after all the necessary expenses are deducted out that accrues on said crop. Outside of the Freedmen’s labor in harvesting, carrying to market and selling the same the said Freedmen . . . covenant and agrees to and with said Thomas J. Ross that for and in consideration of one half of the crop before mentioned that they will plant, cultivate, and raise under the management control and Superintendence of said Ross, in good faith, a cotton, corn and oat crop under his management for the year 1866. And we the said Freedmen agrees to furnish ourselves & families in provisions, clothing, medicine and medical bills and all, and every kind of other expenses that we may incur on said plantation for the year 1866 free of charge to said Ross. Should the said Ross furnish us any of the above supplies or any other kind of expenses, during said year, [we] are to settle and pay him out of the net proceeds of our part of the crop the retail price of the county at time of sale or any price we may agree upon—The said Ross shall keep a regular book account, against each and every one or the head of every family to be adjusted and settled at the end of the year. We furthermore bind ourselves to and with said Ross that we will do good work and labor ten hours a day on an average, winter and summer. . . . We further agree that we will lose all lost time, or pay at the rate of one dollar per day, rainy days excepted. In sickness and women lying in childbed are to lose the time and account for it to the other hands out Q U E S T I O N S of his or her part of the crop. . . . We furthermore bind ourselves that we will 1. Why do the black petitioners believe obey the orders of said Ross in all things in carrying that owning land is essential to the out and managing said crop for said year and be enjoyment of freedom? docked for disobedience . . . and are also respon- sible to said Ross if we carelessly, maliciously 2. In what ways does the contract limit maltreat any of his stock for said year to said Ross the freedom of the laborers? for damages to be assessed out of our wages. Samuel (X) Johnson, Thomas (X) Richard, 3. What do these documents suggest Tinny (X) Fitch, Jessie (X) Simmons, Sophe (X) about competing definitions of black Pruden, Henry (X) Pruden, Frances (X) Pruden, freedom in the aftermath of slavery? Elijah (X) Smith. V O I C E S O F F R E E D O M 451 S H A R E C R O P P I N G I N T H E S O U T H , 1 8 8 0 Percentage of farms sharecropped (by county) 35–80% 26–34% 20–25% 13–19% 0–12% VIRGINIA NORTH CAROLINA TENNESSEE ARKANSAS SOUTH CAROLINA GEORGIA TEXAS MISSISSIPPI ALABAMA A t l a n t i c LOUISIANA O c e a n FLORIDA Gulf of Mexico 0 150 200 miles 0 150 200 kilometers By 1880, sharecropping had become crop-lien system are illustrated by the case of Matt Brown, a Mississippi the dominant form of agricultural farmer who borrowed money each year from a local merchant. He began labor in large parts of the South. The system involved both white and black 1892 with a debt of $226 held over from the previous year. By 1893, farmers. although he produced cotton worth $171, Brown’s debt had increased to $402, because he had borrowed $33 for food, $29 for clothing, $173 for supplies, and $112 for other items. Brown never succeeded in getting out of debt. He died in 1905; the last entry under his name in the merchant’s account book is a coffin. Even as the rural South stagnated economically, southern cities expe- Growth of southern cities rienced remarkable growth after the Civil War. As railroads penetrated the interior, they enabled merchants in market centers like Atlanta to trade directly with the North, bypassing coastal cities that had traditionally monopolized southern commerce. A new urban middle class of merchants, railroad promoters, and bankers reaped the benefits of the spread of cotton production in the postwar South. 452 C h a p t e r 1 5  “What Is Freedom?” What visions of freedom did the former slaves and slaveholders pursue in the postwar South? The cotton depot at Guthrie, Texas. Bales of cotton have been loaded onto trains for shipment. After the Civil War, more and more white farmers began growing cotton to support their families, permanently altering their formerly self-sufficient way of life. A f t e r m a t h o f S l a v e r y The United States, of course, was not the only society to confront the prob- lem of the transition from slavery to freedom. Indeed, many parallels exist Emancipation in the Western between the debates during Reconstruction and struggles that followed Hemisphere slavery in other parts of the Western Hemisphere over the same issues of land, control of labor, and political power. Planters elsewhere held the same stereotypical views of black laborers as were voiced by their coun- terparts in the United States—former slaves were supposedly lazy and lacking in ambition, and thought that freedom meant an absence of labor. For their part, former slaves throughout the hemisphere tried to carve Chinese laborers at work on out as much independence as possible, both in their daily lives and in their a Louisiana plantation during Reconstruction. labor. On small Caribbean islands like Barbados, where no unoccupied land existed, former slaves had no alternative but to return to plantation labor. Elsewhere, the plantations either fell to pieces, as in Haiti, or continued operating with a new labor force composed of indentured ser- vants from India and China, as in Jamaica, Trinidad, and British Guiana. Southern planters in the United States brought in a few Chinese laborers in an attempt to replace freedmen, but since the federal government opposed such efforts, the Chinese remained only a tiny proportion of the southern workforce. But if struggles over land and labor united its poste- mancipation experience with that of other societies, in T H E M E A N I N G O F F R E E D O M 453 one respect the United States was unique. Only in the United States were former slaves, within two years of the end of slavery, granted the right Emancipation and the to vote and, thus, given a major share of political power. Few anticipated right to vote this development when the Civil War ended. It came about as the result of one of the greatest political crises of American history—the battle between President Andrew Johnson and Congress over Reconstruction. The struggle resulted in profound changes in the nature of citizenship, the structure of constitutional authority, and the meaning of American freedom. T H E M A K I N G O F R A D I C A L R E C O N S T R U C T I O N A n d r e w J o h n s o n To Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, fell the task of overseeing the restoration of the Union. Born in poverty in North Carolina, as a youth Johnson’s background Johnson worked as a tailor’s apprentice. Becoming a successful politician after moving to Tennessee, Johnson identified himself as the champion of his state’s “honest yeomen” and a foe of large planters, whom he described as a “bloated, corrupted aristocracy.” A strong defender of the Union, he became the only senator from a seceding state to remain at his post in Washington, D.C., when the Civil War began in 1861. When northern forces occupied Tennessee, Abraham Lincoln named him military gov- ernor. In 1864, Republicans nominated him to run for vice president as a symbol of the party’s hope of extending its organization into the South. Outlook In personality and outlook, Johnson proved unsuited for the respon- sibilities he shouldered after Lincoln’s death. A lonely, stubborn man, he was intolerant of criticism and unable to compromise. He lacked Lincoln’s political skills and keen sense of public opinion. Moreover, while Johnson had supported emancipation once Lincoln made it a goal of the war effort, he held deeply racist views. African-Americans, Johnson believed, had no role to play in Reconstruction. T h e F a i l u r e o f P r e s i d e n t i a l R e c o n s t r u c t i o n A little over a month after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, and with Congress out of session until December, Johnson in May 1865 outlined his plan for reuniting the nation. He issued a series of proclamations that 454 C h a p t e r 1 5  “What Is Freedom?” What were the competing visions of Reconstruction? began the period of Presidential Reconstruction (1865–1867). Johnson offered a pardon (which restored political and property rights, except for Johnson’s program slaves) to nearly all white southerners who took an oath of allegiance. He excluded Confederate leaders and wealthy planters whose prewar property had been valued at more than $20,000. Most of those exempted, however, soon received individual pardons from the president. Johnson also appointed provisional governors and ordered them to call state con- ventions, elected by whites alone, that would establish loyal governments in the South. Apart from the requirement that they abolish slavery, repu- diate secession, and refuse to pay the Confederate debt—all unavoidable consequences of southern defeat—he granted the new governments a free hand in managing local affairs. The conduct of the southern governments elected under Johnson’s program turned most of the Republican North against the president. By and large, white voters returned prominent Confederates and members of the old elite to power. Reports of violence directed against former slaves and northern visitors in the South further alarmed Republicans. T h e B l a c k C o d e s But what aroused the most opposition to Johnson’s Reconstruction policy were the Black Codes, laws passed by the new southern governments that attempted to regulate the lives of the former slaves. These laws granted Regulating former slaves blacks certain rights, such as legalized marriage, ownership of property, and limited access to the courts. But they denied them the rights to testify Selling a Freedman to Pay His Fine at Monticello, Florida, an engraving from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, January 19, 1867. Under the Black Codes enacted by southern legislatures immediately after the Civil War, blacks convicted of “vagrancy”—often because they refused to sign contracts to work on plantations—were fined and, if unable to pay, auctioned off to work for the person who paid the fine.