The darkest hour by caroline tung richmond chapter summaries

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SEVENTH EDITION

AMERICA

George Brown Tindall and David Emory Shi

A NARRATIVE HISTORY

Volume Two

� AMERICA

D E TA I L O F E N G R AV I N G B A S E D O N

T H E C H A S M O F T H E C O LO R A D O

B Y T H O M A S M O R A N

AMERICA

Seventh Edition Volume Iwo

G E O R G E B R OW N T I N DA L L

DAV I D E M O R Y S H I

W . W . N O R T O N & C O M P A N Y . N E W Y O R K . L O N D O N

A N A R R A T I V E H I S T O R Y

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Acknowledgments and copyrights continue on page A104, which serves as a continuation of the copyright page.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the one-volume edition as follows:

Tindall, George Brown. America : a narrative history / George Brown Tindall,

David E. Shi.—7th ed. p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 13: 978-0-393-92820-4 ISBN 10: 0-393-11091-5 1. United States—History. I. Shi, David E. II. Title.

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�CONTENTS

List of Maps • xix

Preface • xxi

18 | RECONSTRUCTION: NORTH AND SOUTH 659

THE WAR’S AFTERMATH 659 • THE BATTLE OVER RECONSTRUCTION 664

• RECONSTRUCTING THE SOUTH 673 • THE RECONSTRUCTED SOUTH 679

• THE GRANT YEARS 686 • FURTHER READING 698

Part Five / G R O W I N G P A I N S 19 | THE SOUTH AND THE WEST TRANSFORMED 705 THE NEW SOUTH 706 • THE NEW WEST 721 • FURTHER READING 742

20 | BIG BUSINESS AND ORGANIZED LABOR 743 THE RISE OF BIG BUSINESS 743 • ENTREPRENEURS 753 • LABOR

CONDITIONS AND ORGANIZATION 760 • FURTHER READING 777

xiii

21 | THE EMERGENCE OF URBAN AMERICA 779 AMERICA’S MOVE TO TOWN 780 • THE NEW IMMIGRATION 786

• POPULAR CULTURE 793 • EDUCATION AND THE PROFESSIONS 801

• THEORIES OF SOCIAL CHANGE 804 • THE SOCIAL GOSPEL 810

• EARLY EFFORTS AT URBAN REFORM 812 • FURTHER READING 818

22 | GILDED AGE POLITICS AND AGRARIAN REVOLT 819 PARADOXICAL POLITICS 820 • CORRUPTION AND REFORM 822 • THE FARM

PROBLEM AND AGRARIAN PROTEST MOVEMENTS 838 • THE ECONOMY

AND THE SILVER SOLUTION 846 • FURTHER READING 853

Part Six / M O D E R N A M E R I C A 23 | AN AMERICAN EMPIRE 859 TOWARD THE NEW IMPERIALISM 860 • EXPANSION IN THE PACIFIC 862

• THE SPANISH-AMERICAN WAR 865 • IMPERIAL RIVALRIES IN EAST ASIA 878

• BIG STICK-DIPLOMACY 880 • FURTHER READING 889

24 | THE PROGRESSIVE ERA 890 ELEMENTS OF REFORM 891 • FEATURES OF PROGRESSIVISM 893

• ROOSEVELT’S PROGRESSIVISM 898 • ROOSEVELT’S SECOND TERM 902

• FROM ROOSEVELT TO TAFT 910 • WILSON’S PROGRESSIVISM 916

• LIMITS OF PROGRESSIVISM 927 • FURTHER READING 928

25 | AMERICA AND THE GREAT WAR 930 WILSON AND FOREIGN AFFAIRS 931 • AN UNEASY NEUTRALITY 934

• AMERICA’S ENTRY INTO THE WAR 944 • “THE DECISIVE POWER” 950

• THE FIGHT FOR THE PEACE 955 • LURCHING FROM WAR TO PEACE 962

• FURTHER READING 967

xiv • Contents

Contents • xv

26 | THE MODERN TEMPER 968 REACTION IN THE TWENTIES 969 • THE ROARING TWENTIES 975

• THE CULTURE OF MODERNISM 984 • FURTHER READING 990

27 | REPUBLICAN RESURGENCE AND DECLINE 991 “NORMALCY” 992 • THE NEW ERA 1000 • PRESIDENT HOOVER,

THE ENGINEER 1010 • FURTHER READING 1021

28 | NEW DEAL AMERICA 1022 FROM HOOVERISM TO THE NEW DEAL 1023 • RECOVERY THROUGH

REGULATION 1032 • THE HUMAN COST OF THE DEPRESSION 1038

• CULTURE IN THE THIRTIES 1043 • THE SECOND NEW DEAL 1046

• ROOSEVELT’S SECOND TERM 1052 • THE LEGACY OF THE NEW DEAL 1059

• FURTHER READING 1062

29 | FROM ISOLATION TO GLOBAL WAR 1063 POSTWAR ISOLATIONISM 1063 • WAR CLOUDS 1069 • THE STORM IN

EUROPE 1078 • THE STORM IN THE PACIFIC 1084

• FURTHER READING 1090

30 | THE SECOND WORLD WAR 1091 AMERICA’S EARLY BATTLES 1092 • MOBILIZATION AT HOME 1094

• SOCIAL EFFECTS OF THE WAR 1096 • THE ALLIED DRIVE TOWARD BERLIN 1102

• LEAPFROGGING TO TOKYO 1114 • A NEW AGE IS BORN 1118

• THE FINAL LEDGER 1129 • FURTHER READING 1130

Part Seven / T H E A M E R I C A N A G E 31 | THE FAIR DEAL AND CONTAINMENT 1137 DEMOBILIZATION UNDER TRUMAN 1138 • THE COLD WAR 1143 • CIVIL

RIGHTS DURING THE 1940S 1152 • THE COLD WAR HEATS UP 1160

• FURTHER READING 1170

xvi • Contents

32 | THROUGH THE PICTURE WINDOW: SOCIETY AND CULTURE, 1945–1960 1171

PEOPLE OF PLENTY 1172 • A CONFORMING CULTURE 1179 • CRACKS IN THE

PICTURE WINDOW 1184 • ALIENATION AND LIBERATION 1187

• A PARADOXICAL ERA 1193 • FURTHER READING 1194

33 | CONFLICT AND DEADLOCK: THE EISENHOWER YEARS 1195 “TIME FOR A CHANGE” 1196 • EISENHOWER’S HIDDEN-HAND PRESIDENCY 1198

• FOREIGN INTERVENTION 1203 • REELECTION AND FOREIGN CRISES 1209

• FESTERING PROBLEMS ABROAD 1215 • THE EARLY YEARS OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS

MOVEMENT 1218 • ASSESSING THE EISENHOWER YEARS 1223

• FURTHER READING 1225

34 | NEW FRONTIERS: POLITICS AND SOCIAL CHANGE IN THE 1960S 1226

THE NEW FRONTIER 1227 • EXPANSION OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 1232

• FOREIGN FRONTIERS 1238 • LYNDON JOHNSON AND THE GREAT SOCIETY 1244

• FROM CIVIL RIGHTS TO BLACK POWER 1251 • THE TRAGEDY OF VIETNAM 1254

• SIXTIES CRESCENDO 1260 • FURTHER READING 1264

35 | REBELLION AND REACTION IN THE 1960S AND 1970S 1266 THE ROOTS OF REBELLION 1267 • NIXON AND VIETNAM 1283 • NIXON AND

MIDDLE AMERICA 1290 • NIXON TRIUMPHANT 1295 • WATERGATE 1299 •

AN UNELECTED PRESIDENT 1303 • THE CARTER INTERREGNUM 1306

• FURTHER READING 1311

36 | A CONSERVATIVE INSURGENCY 1313 THE REAGAN REVOLUTION 1314 • REAGAN’S FIRST TERM 1319

• REAGAN’S SECOND TERM 1324 • THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION 1334

• FURTHER READING 1341

Contents • xvii

37 | TRIUMPH AND TRAGEDY: AMERICA AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY 1342

AMERICA’S CHANGING MOSAIC 1343 • CULTURAL CONSERVATISM 1347

• BUSH TO CLINTON 1349 • DOMESTIC POLICY IN CLINTON’S FIRST TERM 1353

• REPUBLICAN INSURGENCY 1356 • ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL TRENDS OF

THE 1990S 1360 • FOREIGN-POLICY CHALLENGES 1365 • THE ELECTION

OF 2000 1369 • COMPASSIONATE CONSERVATISM 1372 • GLOBAL

TERRORISM 1374 • A STALLED PRESIDENCY 1389 • FURTHER READING 1390

GLOSSARY A1

APPENDIX A43

THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE A45 • ARTICLES OF

CONFEDERATION A50 • THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES A58

• PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS A80 • ADMISSION OF STATES A88

• POPULATION OF THE UNITED STATES A89 • IMMIGRATION TO THE UNITED

STATES, FISCAL YEARS 1820–2005 A90 • IMMIGRATION BY REGION AND

SELECTED COUNTRY OF LAST RESIDENCE, FISCAL YEARS 1820–2004 A92

• PRESIDENTS, VICE-PRESIDENTS, AND SECRETARIES OF STATE A99

CREDITS A104

INDEX A108

�M A P S

The Election of 1876 696

Sharecropping and Tenancy, 1880–1900 709

The New West 726–727

Indian Wars, 1864–1890 731

Transcontinental Railroad Lines, 1880s 749

The Emergence of Cities, 1880 781

The Emergence of Cities, 1920 782

Women’s Suffrage, 1869–1914 815

The Election of 1896 851

The Spanish-American War in the Pacific, 1898 870

The Spanish-American War in the Caribbean, 1898 872

U.S. Interests in the Pacific 875

U.S. Interests in the Caribbean 885

The Election of 1912 920

World War I in Europe, 1914 937

World War I, the Western Front, 1918 952

Europe after the Treaty of Versailles, 1918 960

The Election of 1932 1026

The Tennessee Valley Authority 1037

Aggression in Europe, 1935–1939 1074

Japanese Expansion before Pearl Harbor 1086

World War II Military Alliances, 1942 1104

World War II in Europe and Africa, 1942–1945 1106–1107

World War II in the Pacific, 1942–1945 1116–1117

The Occupation of Germany and Austria 1151

The Election of 1948 1159

xix

xx • Maps

The Korean War, 1950 1163

The Korean War, 1950–1953 1163

The Election of 1952 1197

Postwar Alliances: The Far East 1208

Postwar Alliances: Europe, North Africa, the Middle East 1211

The Election of 1960 1230

Vietnam, 1966 1256

The Election of 1968 1262

The Election of 1980 1318

The Election of 1988 1333

The Election of 2000 1370

The Election of 2004 1385

�P R E F A C E

Just as history is never complete, neither is a historical textbook. We have

learned much from the responses of readers and instructors to the first six

editions of America: A Narrative History. Perhaps the most important and

reassuring lesson is that our original intention has proved valid: to provide a

compelling narrative history of the American experience, a narrative ani-

mated by human characters, informed by analysis and social texture, and

guided by the unfolding of events. Readers have also endorsed the book’s

distinctive size and format. America is designed to be read and to carry a

moderate price. While the book retains its classic look, America sports a new

color design for the Seventh Edition. We have added new eye-catching maps

and included new art in full color. Despite these changes, we have not raised

the price between the Sixth and the Seventh Editions.

As in previous revisions of America, we have adopted an overarching theme

that informs many of the new sections we introduce throughout the Seventh

Edition. In previous editions we have traced such broad-ranging themes as

immigration, the frontier and the West, popular culture, and work. In each

case we blend our discussions of the selected theme into the narrative, where

they reside through succeeding editions.

The Seventh Edition of America highlights environmental history, a rela-

tively new field that examines how people have shaped—and been shaped

by—the natural world. Geographic features, weather, plants, animals, and

diseases are important elements of environmental history. Environmental

historians study how environments have changed as a result of natural

processes such as volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, hurricanes, wildfires,

droughts, floods, and climatic changes. They also study how societies have

used and abused their natural environment through economic activities such

as hunting, farming, logging and mining, manufacturing, building dams, and

xxi

irrigation. Equally interesting is how different societies over time have per-

ceived nature, as reflected in their religion, art, literature, and popular cul-

ture, and how they have reshaped nature according to those perceptions

through the creation of parks, preserves, and designed landscapes. Finally,

another major area of inquiry among environmental historians centers on

the development of laws and regulations to govern the use of nature and

maintain the quality of the natural environment.

Some of the new additions to the Seventh Edition related to environmen-

tal history are listed below.

• Chapter 1 includes discussions of the transmission of deadly infectious

diseases from Europe to the New World and the ecological and social im-

pact of the arrival of horses on the Great Plains.

• Chapter 3 examines the ways in which European livestock reshaped

the New World environment and complicated relations with Native

Americans.

• Chapters 5 and 6 describe the effects of smallpox on the American armies

during the Revolution.

• Chapter 12 details the impact of early industrialization on the environment.

• Chapter 17 describes the impact of the Civil War on the southern land-

scape.

• Chapter 19 includes new material related to the environmental impact of

the sharecrop-tenant farm system in the South after the Civil War, indus-

trial mining in the Far West, and the demise of the buffalo on the Great

Plains.

• Chapter 21 describes the dramatic rise of large cities after the Civil War

and the distinctive aspects of the urban environment.

• Chapter 24 surveys the key role played by sportsmen in the emergence of

the conservation movement during the late nineteenth century and de-

tails Theodore Roosevelt’s efforts to preserve the nation’s natural re-

sources.

• Chapter 28 surveys the environmental and human effects of the “dust

bowl” during the Great Depression.

• Chapter 37 discusses President George W. Bush’s controversial environ-

mental policies and describes the devastation in Mississippi and

Louisiana wrought by Hurricane Katrina.

xxii • Preface

Beyond these explorations of environmental history we have introduced

other new material throughout the Seventh Edition. Fresh insights from im-

portant new scholarly works have been incorporated, and we feel confident

that the book provides students with an excellent introduction to the Amer-

ican experience.

To enhance the pedagogical features of the text, we have added Focus

Questions at the beginning of each chapter. Students can use these review

tools to remind themselves of the key themes and central issues in the chap-

ters. These questions are also available online as quizzes, the results of which

students can e-mail to their instructors. In addition, the maps feature new

Enhanced Captions designed to encourage students to think analytically

about the relationship between geography and American history.

We have also revised the outstanding ancillary package that supplements

the text. For the Record: A Documentary History of America, Third Edition, by

David E. Shi and Holly A. Mayer (Duquesne University), is a rich resource

with over 300 primary source readings from diaries, journals, newspaper ar-

ticles, speeches, government documents, and novels. The Study Guide, by

Charles Eagles (University of Mississippi), is another valuable resource. This

edition contains chapter outlines, learning objectives, timelines, expanded

vocabulary exercises, and many new short-answer and essay questions.

America: A Narrative History Study Space is an online collection of tools for

review and research. It includes chapter summaries, review questions and

quizzes, interactive map exercises, timelines, and research modules, many

new to this edition. Norton Media Library is a CD-ROM slide and text re-

source that includes images from the text, four-color maps, additional

images from the Library of Congress archives, and audio files of significant

historical speeches. Finally, the Instructor’s Manual and Test Bank, by Mark

Goldman (Tallahassee Community College) and Steven Davis (Kingwood

College) includes a test bank of short-answer and essay questions, as well as

detailed chapter outlines, lecture suggestions, and bibliographies.

In preparing the Seventh Edition, we have benefited from the insights and

suggestions of many people. Some of these insights have come from student

readers of the text and we encourage such feedback. Among the scholars and

survey instructors who offered us their comments and suggestions are: James

Lindgren (SUNY Plattsburgh), Joe Kudless (Raritan Valley Community Col-

lege), Anthony Quiroz (Texas A&M University – Corpus Christi), Steve Davis

(Kingwood College), Mark Fiege (Colorado State University), David Head

(John Tyler Community College), Hutch Johnson (Gordon College), Charles

Preface • xxiii

Eagles (University of Mississippi), Christina White and Eddie Weller at the

South campus of San Jacinto College, Blanche Brick, Cathy Lively, Stephen

Kirkpatrick, Patrick Johnson, Thomas Stephens, and others at the Bryan

Campus of Blinn College, Evelyn Mangie (University of South Florida),

Michael McConnell (University of Alabama – Birmingham), Alan Lessoff

(Illinois State University), Joseph Cullon (Dartmouth University), Keith Bo-

hannon (University of West Georgia), Tim Heinrichs (Bellevue Community

College), Mary Ann Heiss (Kent State University), Edmund Wehrle (Eastern

Illinois University), Adam Howard (University of Florida), David Parker

(Kennesaw State University), Barrett Esworthy (Jamestown Community Col-

lege), Samantha Barbas (Chapman University), Jason Newman (Cosumnes

River College), Paul Cimbala (Fordham University), Dean Fafoutis (Salisbury

University), Thomas Schilz (Miramar Community College), Richard Frucht

(Northwest Missouri State University), James Vlasich (Southern Utah Uni-

versity), Michael Egan (Washington State University), Robert Goldberg (Uni-

versity of Utah), Jason Lantzer (Indiana University), and Beth Kreydatus

(College of William & Mary). Our special thanks go Tom Pearcy (Slippery

Rock University) for all of his work on the timelines. Once again, we thank

our friends at W. W. Norton, especially Steve Forman, Steve Hoge, Karl Bake-

man, Neil Hoos, Lory Frenkel, Roy Tedoff, Dan Jost, Rebecca Arata, and Matt

Arnold, for their care and attention along the way.

—George B. Tindall —David E. Shi

xxiv • Preface

�

In the spring of 1865, the Civil War was over. At a frightful cost of620,000 lives and the destruction of the southern economy andmuch of its landscape, American nationalism had emerged tri- umphant, and some 4 million enslaved Americans had seized their freedom. Ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in December 1865 abolished slavery throughout the Union. Now the nation faced the task of reuniting, coming to terms with the abolition of slavery, and “reconstructing” a rav- aged and resentful South.

T H E WA R’ S A F T E R M AT H

In the war’s aftermath important questions faced the victors: Should the Confederate leaders be tried for treason? How should new governments be formed? How and at whose expense was the South’s economy to be rebuilt?

R E C O N S T R U C T I O N : N O R T H

A N D S O U T H

18

F O C U S Q U E S T I O N S

• What were the different approaches to Reconstruction?

• How did Congress try to reshape southern society?

• What was the role of African Americans in the postwar South?

• What were the main issues in national politics in the 1870s?

To answer these questions and access additional review material, please visit www.wwnorton.com/studyspace.

http://www.wwnorton.com/college/history/america7/content/ch18/study.htm
Should debts incurred by the Confederate state governments be honored? Who should pay to rebuild the South’s railroads and public buildings, dredge the clogged southern harbors, and restore damaged levees? What was to be done for the freed slaves? Were they to be given land? social equal- ity? education? voting rights? Such complex questions required sober reflection and careful planning, but policy makers did not have the luxury of time or the benefits of consensus. Some wanted the former Confederate states returned to the Union with little or no changes in the region’s social, political, and economic life. Others wanted southern society punished and transformed. The editors of the nation’s foremost magazine, Harper’s Weekly, expressed the vengeful attitude when they declared at the end of 1865 that “the forgive-and-forget policy . . . is mere political insanity and suicide.”

D E V E L O P M E N T I N T H E N O RT H To some Americans the Civil War had been more truly a social revolution than the War of Independence, for it reduced the once-dominant power of the South’s planter elite in national politics and elevated the power of the northern “captains of industry.” Government, both federal, and state, became more friendly to business leaders and more unfriendly to those who would probe into their activities. The wartime Republican Congress had delivered on the major platform promises of 1860, which had cemented the allegiance of northeastern businessmen and western farmers to the party of free labor.

In the absence of southern members, Congress during the war had cen- tralized national power and enacted the Republican economic agenda. It passed the Morrill tariff, which doubled the average level of import du- ties. The National Banking Act created a uniform system of banking and bank-note currency and helped finance the war. Congress also passed legislation guaranteeing that the first transcontinental railroad would run along a north-central route, from Omaha, Nebraska, to Sacramento, California, and it donated public land and public bonds to ensure its fi- nancing. In the Homestead Act of 1862, moreover, Congress voted free federal homesteads of 160 acres to settlers, who had only to occupy the land for five years to gain title. No cash was needed. The Morrill Land Grant Act of the same year conveyed to each state 30,000 acres of federal land per member of Congress from the state. The sale of some of the land provided funds to create colleges of “agriculture and mechanic arts.” Such measures helped stimulate the North’s economy in the years after the Civil War.

660 • RECONSTRUCTION: NORTH AND SOUTH (CH. 18)

D E VA S TAT I O N I N T H E S O U T H The postwar South offered a sharp contrast to the victorious North. Along the path of General William T. Sherman’s army, one observer reported in 1866, the countryside “looked for many miles like a broad black streak of ruin and desolation.” Columbia, South Carolina, said another witness, was “a wilderness of ruins,” Charleston a place of “vacant houses, of widowed women, of rotting wharves, of de- serted warehouses, of weed-wild gardens, of miles of grass-grown streets, of acres of pitiful and voiceless barrenness.”

Throughout the South, property values had collapsed. Confederate bonds and paper money were worthless; most railroads were damaged or de- stroyed. Cotton that had escaped destruction was seized by federal troops. Emancipation wiped out $4 billion invested in human flesh and left the la- bor system in disarray. The great age of expansion in the cotton market was over. Not until 1879 would the cotton crop again equal the record harvest of 1860; tobacco production did not regain its prewar level until 1880; the sugar crop of Louisiana not until 1893; and the old rice industry of the Tide- water and the hemp industry of the Kentucky Bluegrass never regained their prewar status.

The War’s Aftermath • 661

A Street in the “Burned District”

Ruins of Richmond, Virginia, spring 1865.

A T R A N S F O R M E D S O U T H The defeat of the Confederacy trans- formed much of southern society. The freeing of slaves, the destruction of property, and the collapse of land values left many planters destitute and homeless. Amanda Worthington, a planter’s wife from Mississippi, saw her whole world destroyed. In the fall of 1865, she assessed the damage: “None of us can realize that we are no longer wealthy—yet thanks to the yankees, the cause of all unhappiness, such is the case.”

After the Civil War many former Confederates were so embittered that they abandoned their native region rather than submit to “Yankee rule.” Some migrated to Canada, Europe, Mexico, South America, or Asia. Others preferred the western territories and states. Still others settled in northern and midwestern cities on the assumption that educational and economic opportunities would be better among the victors.

Those who remained in the South found old social roles reversed. One Confederate army captain reported that on his father’s plantation “our negroes are living in great comfort. They were delighted to see me with overflowing affection. They waited on me as before, gave me breakfast, splendid dinners, etc. But they firmly and respectfully informed me: ‘We own this land now. Put it out of your head that it will ever be yours again.’ ”

Union troops who fanned out across the defeated South to impose order were cursed and spat upon. A Virginia woman expressed a spirited defiance common among her circle of friends: “Every day, every hour, that I live increases my hatred and detestation, and loathing of that race. They [Yankees] disgrace our common humanity. As a people I consider them vastly inferior to the better classes of our slaves.” Fervent southern nationalists, both men and women, implanted in their children a similar hatred of Yankees and a defiance of northern rule. One mother said that she trained her children to “fear God, love the South, and live to avenge her.”

L E G A L LY F R E E , S O C I A L LY B O U N D In the former Confederate states the newly freed slaves suffered most of all. According to the African- American abolitionist Frederick Douglass, the former slave remained de- pendent: “He had neither money, property, nor friends. He was free from the old plantation, but he had nothing but the dusty road under his feet. . . . He was turned loose, naked, hungry, and destitute to the open sky.” A few northerners argued that what the ex-slaves needed most was their own land. But even dedicated abolitionists shrank from proposals to confiscate white-owned land and distribute it to the freed slaves. Citizenship and

662 • RECONSTRUCTION: NORTH AND SOUTH (CH. 18)

legal rights were one thing, wholesale confiscation of property and land redistribution quite another. Nonetheless, discussions of land distribu- tion fueled false rumors that freed slaves would get “forty acres and a mule,” a slogan that swept the South at the end of the war. Instead of land or material help, the freed slaves more often got advice about proper behavior.

T H E F R E E D M E N ’ S B U R E AU On March 3, 1865, while the war was still raging, Congress set up within the War Department the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands to provide “such issues of provisions, clothing, and fuel” as might be needed to relieve “destitute and suffering refugees and freedmen and their wives and children.” Agents of the Freedmen’s Bureau were entrusted with negotiating labor contracts (something new for both blacks and planters), providing med- ical care, and setting up schools, often in cooperation with such northern agencies as the American Missionary Association and the Freedmen’s Aid Society. The bureau had its own courts to deal with labor disputes and land titles, and its agents were authorized to supervise trials involving blacks in other courts.

White intransigence and the failure to grasp the intensity of racial prejudice increasingly thwarted the efforts of Freedmen’s Bureau agents to protect and

The War’s Aftermath • 663

Freedmen in Richmond, Virginia

According to a former Confederate general, freed blacks had “nothing but freedom.”

assist the former slaves. Congress was not willing to strengthen the powers of the bureau to reflect those problems. Beyond temporary relief measures, no program of Reconstruction ever incorporated much more than constitutional and legal rights for freedmen. These were important in themselves, of course, but the extent to which even they should go was very uncertain, to be settled more by the course of events than by any clear-cut commitment to social and economic equality.

T H E B AT T L E O V E R R E C O N S T RU C T I O N

The problem of reconstructing the South politically centered on decid- ing what governments would constitute authority in the defeated states. This problem arose first in Virginia at the very beginning of the Civil War, when the state’s thirty-five western counties refused to go along with secession. In 1861 a loyal state government of Virginia was proclaimed at Wheeling, and that government in turn formed a new state, called West Virginia, which was

664 • RECONSTRUCTION: NORTH AND SOUTH (CH. 18)

Freedmen’s School in Virginia

Throughout the former Confederate states the Freedmen’s Bureau set up schools such as this one.

admitted to the Union in 1863. As Union forces advanced into the South, President Lincoln in 1862 named military governors for Tennessee, Arkansas, and Louisiana. By the end of the following year, he had formulated a plan for regular governments in those states and any others that might be liberated from Confederate rule.

L I N C O L N ’ S P L A N A N D C O N G R E S S ’ S R E S P O N S E In late 1863, President Lincoln had issued a Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruc- tion, under which any rebel state could form a Union government whenever a number equal to 10 percent of those who had voted in 1860 took an oath of allegiance to the Constitution and the Union and had received a presidential pardon. Participants also had to swear support for laws and proclamations dealing with emancipation. Certain groups, however, were excluded from the pardon: civil and diplomatic officers of the Confederacy; senior officers of the Confederate army and navy; judges, congressmen, and military officers of the United States who had left their federal posts to aid the rebellion; and those accused of failure to treat captured black soldiers and their officers as prisoners of war.

Under this plan, governments loyal to the Union appeared in Tennessee, Arkansas, and Louisiana, but Congress recognized them neither in terms of representation nor in counting the electoral votes of 1864. In the absence of specific provisions for Reconstruction in the Constitution, politicians dis- agreed as to where authority properly rested. Lincoln claimed the right to di- rect Reconstruction under the clause that set forth the presidential power to grant pardons and under the constitutional obligation of the United States to guarantee each state a republican form of government. Republican con- gressmen, however, argued that this obligation implied that Congress, not the president, should supervise Reconstruction.

A few conservative and most moderate Republicans supported Lincoln’s program of immediate restoration. The small but influential group of Radical Republicans, however, favored a sweeping transformation of southern society based upon granting freed slaves full-fledged citizenship. The Radicals hoped to reconstruct southern society so as to dismantle the old planter class and the Democratic party.

The Radicals were talented, earnest men who insisted that Congress control the Reconstruction program. To this end in 1864 they helped pass the Wade- Davis bill, sponsored by Senator Benjamin Wade of Ohio and Representative Henry Winter Davis of Maryland. In contrast to Lincoln’s 10 percent plan, the Wade-Davis bill required that a majority of white male citizens declare their allegiance and that only those who could take an “ironclad” oath (required of

The Battle over Reconstruction • 665

federal officials since 1862) attesting to their past loyalty could vote or serve in the state constitutional conventions. The conventions, moreover, would have to abolish slavery, exclude from political rights high-ranking civil and military officers of the Confederacy, and repudiate debts incurred during the conflict.

Passed during the closing day of the session, the Wade-Davis bill never be- came law: Lincoln vetoed it. In retaliation furious Republicans penned the Wade-Davis Manifesto, which accused the president of usurping power and attempting to use readmitted states to ensure his reelection, among other sins. Lincoln offered his last view of Reconstruction in his final public ad- dress, on April 11, 1865. Speaking from the White House balcony, he pro- nounced that the Confederate states had never left the Union. Those states were simply “out of their proper practical relation with the Union,” and the object was to get them “into their proper practical relation.” At a cabinet meeting, Lincoln proposed the creation of new southern state governments before Congress met in December. He shunned the vindictiveness of the Radicals. He wanted “no persecution, no bloody work,” no radical restruc- turing of southern social and economic life.

T H E A S S A S S I N AT I O N O F L I N C O L N On the evening of April 14, Lincoln went to Ford’s Theater and his rendezvous with death. With his trusted bodyguard called away to Richmond and the policeman assigned to his box away from his post, watching the play, Lincoln was helpless as John Wilkes Booth slipped into the unguarded presidential box. Booth, a crazed actor and Confederate zealot, fired his derringer point-blank at the president’s head. He then stabbed Lincoln’s aide and jumped from the box onto the stage, crying “Sic semper tyrannis” (Thus always to tyrants), the motto of Virginia. The president died nine hours later. Accomplices of Booth had also targeted Vice President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of State William Seward. Seward and four others, including his son, were victims of severe but not fatal stab wounds. Johnson escaped injury, however, because his would-be assassin got cold feet and wound up tipsy in the barroom of the vice president’s hotel.

The nation extracted a full measure of vengeance from the conspirators. Booth was pursued into Virginia and killed in a burning barn. Three of his collaborators were convicted by a military court and hanged, along with the woman at whose boardinghouse they had plotted. Three others got life sen- tences, including a Maryland doctor who set the leg Booth had broken when he jumped to the stage. President Johnson eventually pardoned them all, ex- cept one who died in prison. Apart from those cases, however, there was only one other execution in the aftermath of war: that of the Confederate Henry Wirz, who commanded the infamous prison at Andersonville, Georgia.

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J O H N S O N ’ S P L A N Lincoln’s death elevated to the White House Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, a man who lacked most presidential virtues. When General Ulysses Grant learned that Lincoln had died and Johnson was presi- dent, he said that he “dreaded the change” because the new commander in chief was vindictive toward his native South. Essentially illiterate, Johnson was provincial and bigoted—he harbored fierce prejudices. He was also short- tempered and lacking in self-control. At the inaugural ceremonies in early 1865, he had delivered his address in a state of slurring drunkenness that embarrassed Lincoln and the nation. Johnson was a war (pro-Union) De- mocrat who had been put on the Union ticket in 1864 as a gesture of unity. Of origins as humble as Lincoln’s, Johnson had moved as a youth from his birthplace in Raleigh, North Carolina, to Greeneville, Tennessee, where he became the proprietor of a tailor shop. Self-educated with the help of his wife, he had served as mayor, congressman, governor, and senator, then as military governor of Tennessee before he became vice president. In the pro- cess he had become an advocate of the small farmers in opposition to the privileges of the large planters—“a bloated, corrupted aristocracy.” He also

The Battle over Reconstruction • 667

Presidential Assassination

The funeral procession for President Lincoln.

shared the racist attitudes of most white yeomen. “Damn the negroes,” he exclaimed to a friend during the war, “I am fighting those traitorous aristocrats, their masters.”

Some of the Radicals at first thought Johnson, unlike Lincoln, to be one of them. Johnson had, for ex- ample, once asserted that treason “must be made infamous and traitors must be impoverished.” Senator Ben- jamin Wade loved such vengeful lan- guage. “Johnson, we have faith in you,” he promised. “By the gods, there will be no trouble now in running this government.” But Wade would soon find Johnson as unsympathetic as Lincoln, if for different reasons.

Johnson’s loyalty to the Union sprang from a strict adherence to the Con- stitution and a fervent belief in limited government. When discussing what to do with the former Confederate states, Johnson preferred the term restoration to reconstruction. He held that the rebellious states should be quickly brought back into their proper relation to the Union because the states and the Union were indestructible. In 1865 Johnson declared that “there is no such thing as reconstruction. Those States have not gone out of the Union. Therefore re- construction is unnecessary.” Like many other whites he found it hard to ac- cept the growing Radical sentiment to grant the vote to blacks.

Johnson’s plan to restore the Union thus closely resembled Lincoln’s. A new Proclamation of Amnesty (May 1865) excluded not only those Lincoln had excluded from pardon but also everybody with taxable property worth more than $20,000. Those wealthy planters, bankers, and merchants were the people Johnson believed had led the South to secede. Those in the excluded groups might make special applications for pardon directly to the president, and before the year was out Johnson had issued some 13,000 pardons.

Johnson followed up his amnesty proclamation with his own plan for readmitting the former Confederate states. In each state a native Unionist became provisional governor with authority to call a convention of men elected by loyal voters. Lincoln’s 10 percent requirement was omitted. John- son called upon the state conventions to invalidate the secession ordinances, abolish slavery, and repudiate all debts incurred to aid the Confederacy. Each

668 • RECONSTRUCTION: NORTH AND SOUTH (CH. 18)

Andrew Johnson

A pro-Union Democrat from Tennessee.

state, moreover, was to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment. Lincoln had pri- vately advised the governor of Louisiana to consider giving the vote to some blacks, “the very intelligent and those who have fought gallantly in our ranks.” In his final public address he had also endorsed a limited black suf- frage. Johnson repeated Lincoln’s advice. He reminded the provisional gov- ernor of Mississippi, for example, that the state conventions might “with perfect safety” extend suffrage to blacks with education or with military ser- vice so as to “disarm the adversary,” the adversary being “radicals who are wild upon” giving all blacks the right to vote.

The state conventions for the most part met Johnson’s requirements. But Carl Schurz, a German immigrant and war hero who became a prominent Mis- souri politician, found during his visit to the South “an utter absence of national feeling . . . and a desire to preserve slavery . . . as much and as long as possible.” Southern whites had accepted the situation because they thought so little had changed after all. Emboldened by Johnson’s indulgence, they ignored his pleas for moderation and conciliation. Suggestions of black suffrage were scarcely raised in the state conventions and promptly squelched when they were.

S O U T H E R N I N T R A N S I G E N C E When Congress met in December 1865, for the first time since the end of the war, it faced the fact that the new state governments in the postwar South were remarkably like the old ones. Southern voters had acted with extreme disregard for northern feelings. Among the new members presenting themselves to Congress were Georgia’s Alexander Stephens, former vice president of the Confederacy, now claiming a seat in the Senate, four Confederate generals, eight colonels, and six cabinet members. The Congress forthwith denied seats to all members from the eleven former Confederate states. It was too much to expect, after four bloody years, that the Unionists in Congress would welcome back ex-Confederates.

Furthermore, the new southern state legislatures, in passing repressive “black codes” restricting the freedom of African Americans, demonstrated that they intended to preserve slavery as nearly as possible. As one white southerner stressed, “The ex-slave was not a free man; he was a free Negro,” and the black codes were intended to highlight the distinction.

The black codes varied from state to state, but some provisions were com- mon. Existing marriages, including common-law marriages, were recognized (although interracial marriages were prohibited), and testimony of blacks was accepted in legal cases involving blacks—and in six states in all cases. Blacks could own property. They could sue and be sued in the courts. On the other hand, they could not own farmland in Mississippi or city lots in South Carolina; they were required to buy special licenses to practice certain trades

The Battle over Reconstruction • 669

in Mississippi. They were required to enter into annual labor contracts. Un- employed (“vagrant”) blacks were punished with severe fines, and if unable to pay, they were forced to labor in the fields of those who paid the courts for this source of cheap labor. Aspects of slavery were simply being restored in another guise. The new Mississippi penal code virtually said so: “All penal and criminal laws now in force describing the mode of punishment of crimes and misdemeanors committed by slaves, free negroes, or mulattoes are hereby reenacted, and decreed to be in full force.”

Faced with such blatant evidence of southern intransigence, moderate Re- publicans in Congress drifted toward the Radicals’ views. Having excluded the “reconstructed” southern members, the new Congress set up a Joint Committee on Reconstruction, with nine members from the House and six from the Senate, to gather evidence of southern efforts to thwart Recon- struction. Initiative fell to determined Radical Republicans who knew what they wanted: Benjamin Wade of Ohio, George Julian of Indiana, and—most conspicuously of all—Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania and Charles Sum- ner of Massachusetts.

T H E R A D I C A L R E P U B L I C A N S Most Radical Republicans had been connected with the anti-slavery cause for decades. In addition, few could

670 • RECONSTRUCTION: NORTH AND SOUTH (CH. 18)

(?) Slavery Is Dead (?)

Thomas Nast’s cartoon suggests that in 1866 slavery was dead only legally.

escape the bitterness bred by the long and bloody war or remain un- aware of the partisan advantage that would come to the Republican party from black suffrage. The Republi- cans needed African-American votes to maintain their control of Congress and the White House. They also needed to disenfranchise former Confederates to keep them from help- ing to elect Democrats who would restore the old southern ruling class to power. In public, however, the Radical Republicans rarely disclosed such par- tisan self-interest. Instead, they as- serted that the Republicans, the party of Union and freedom, could best guarantee the fruits of victory and that ex- tending voting rights to blacks would be the best way to promote their welfare.

The growing conflict of opinion over Reconstruction policy brought about an inversion in constitutional reasoning. Secessionists—and Andrew Johnson— were now arguing that the Rebel states had in fact remained in the Union, and some Radical Republicans were contriving arguments that they had left the Union after all. Thaddeus Stevens argued that the Confederate states were now conquered provinces, subject to the absolute will of the victors, and that the “whole fabric of southern society must be changed.” Charles Sumner main- tained that the southern states, by their pretended acts of secession, had reverted to the status of unorganized territories and thus were subject to the will of Con- gress. Most Republicans, however, converged instead on the “forfeited-rights theory,” later embodied in the report of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction. This held that the states as entities continued to exist, but by the acts of se- cession and war they had forfeited “all civil and political rights under the Constitution.” And Congress, not the president, was the proper authority to determine how and when such rights might be restored.

J O H N S O N ’ S B AT T L E W I T H C O N G R E S S A long year of political battling remained, however, before this idea triumphed. By the end of 1865, the Radical Republicans’ views had gained a majority in Congress, if one not yet large enough to override presidential vetoes. But the critical year of 1866 saw the gradual waning of Andrew Johnson’s power and influence, much of which was self-induced. Johnson first challenged Congress in 1866, when he

The Battle over Reconstruction • 671

Senator Charles Sumner

A leading Radical Republican.

vetoed a bill to extend the life of the Freedmen’s Bureau. The measure, he said, assumed that wartime conditions still existed, whereas the country had returned “to a state of peace and industry.” Because it was no longer valid as a war measure, the bill violated the Constitution in several ways, he declared: it made the federal government responsible for the care of indi- gents, it was passed by a Congress in which eleven states had been denied seats, and it used vague language in defining the “civil rights and immuni- ties” of blacks. For the time being, Johnson’s prestige remained sufficiently intact that the Senate upheld his veto.

Three days after the veto, however, during an impromptu speech, Johnson undermined his already weakening authority with a fiery assault upon Radi- cal Republican leaders. From that point forward, moderate Republicans backed away from a president who had opened himself to counterattack. The Radical Republicans took the offensive. Johnson was “an alien enemy of a foreign state,” Stevens declared. Sumner called him “an insolent drunken brute”—and Johnson was open to the charge because of his behavior at the 1865 inauguration. Weakened by illness, he had taken a belt of brandy to get through the ceremony and, under the influence of fever and alcohol, had been incoherent.

In mid-March 1866 the Radical-led Congress passed the Civil Rights Act. A response to the black codes created by unrepentant southern state legislatures,

this bill declared that “all persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power, ex- cluding Indians not taxed,” were citizens entitled to “full and equal benefit of all laws.” The grant- ing of citizenship to native-born blacks, Johnson fumed, exceeded the scope of federal power. It would, moreover, “foment dis- cord among the races.” Johnson vetoed the bill, but this time, on April 9, Congress overrode the presidential veto. On July 16 it en- acted a revised Freedmen’s Bu- reau bill, again overriding a veto. From that point on, Johnson steadily lost both public and po- litical support.

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The Cruel Uncle

A cartoon depicting Andrew Johnson lead- ing two children, “Civil Rights” and “the Freedmen’s Bureau,” into the “Veto Wood.”

T H E F O U RT E E N T H A M E N D M E N T To remove all doubt about the constitutionality of the new Civil Rights Act, the joint committee recom- mended a new constitutional amendment, which passed Congress on June 16, 1866, and was declared by Congress to have been ratified by the states on July 28, 1868. The Fourteenth Amendment went far beyond the Civil Rights Act, however. It reaffirmed the state and federal citizenship of persons born or naturalized in the United States, and it forbade any state (the word state would be important in later litigation) to “abridge the privileges or immuni- ties of citizens,” to deprive any person (again an important term) “of life, lib- erty, or property, without due process of law,” or to “deny any person . . . the equal protection of the laws.” These three clauses have been the subject of many lawsuits, resulting in applications not widely, if at all, foreseen at the time. The “due-process clause” has come to mean that state as well as federal power is subject to the Bill of Rights, and it has been used to protect corpora- tions, as legal “persons,” from “unreasonable” regulation by the states. Other provisions of the amendment have had less far-reaching effects. One section specified that the debt of the United States “shall not be questioned” by the former Confederate states and declared “illegal and void” all debts contracted in aid of the rebellion. The final sentence specified the power of Congress to pass laws enforcing the amendment.

Johnson’s home state was among the first to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment. In Tennessee, which had harbored more Unionists than any other Confederate state, the government had fallen under Radical Republi- can control. The state’s governor, in reporting the results to the secretary of the Senate, added, “Give my respects to the dead dog of the White House.” His words illustrate the growing acrimony on both sides of the Reconstruc- tion debates. In May and July, race riots in Memphis and New Orleans added fuel to the flames. Both incidents involved indiscriminate massacres of blacks by local police and white mobs. The carnage, Radical Republicans argued, was the natural fruit of Johnson’s policy. “Witness Memphis, wit- ness New Orleans,” Senator Charles Sumner cried. “Who can doubt that the President is the author of these tragedies?”

R E C O N S T RU C T I N G T H E S O U T H

T H E T R I U M P H O F C O N G R E S S I O N A L R E C O N S T RU C T I O N As 1866 drew to an end, the congressional elections promised to be a referendum on the growing split between Andrew Johnson and the Radical Republicans. Johnson sought to influence voters with a speaking tour of the Midwest, a

Reconstructing the South • 673

“swing around the circle,” which turned into an undignified shouting contest between Andrew Johnson and his critics. In Cleveland he described the Radical Republicans as “factious, domineering, tyrannical” men, and he foolishly ex- changed hot-tempered insults with a heckler. At another stop, while Johnson was speaking from an observation car, the engineer mistakenly pulled the train out of the station, making the president appear quite the fool. Such incidents tended to confirm his image as a “ludicrous boor” and a “drunken imbecile,” which Radical Republicans promoted. In the 1866 congressional elections the Republicans won more than a two-thirds majority in each house, a comfortable margin with which to override presidential vetoes.

Congress in fact enacted a new program even before the new members took office. Two acts passed in 1867 extended the suffrage to African Ameri- cans in the District of Columbia and the territories. Another law provided that the new Congress would convene on March 4 instead of the following December, depriving Johnson of a breathing spell. On March 2, 1867, two days before the old Congress expired, it passed over Johnson’s vetoes three basic laws promoting congressional Reconstruction: the Military Recon- struction Act, the Command of the Army Act (an amendment to an army appropriation), and the Tenure of Office Act.

The first of the three acts prescribed conditions under which the forma- tion of southern state governments should begin all over again. The other two sought to block any effort by the president to obstruct the process. The Command of the Army Act required that all orders from the commander in chief go through the headquarters of the general of the army, then Ulysses Grant. The Radical Republicans trusted Grant, who was already leaning their way. The Tenure of Office Act required Senate permission for the presi- dent to remove any officeholder whose appointment the Senate had con- firmed. The purpose of at least some congressmen was to retain Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, the one Radical Republican sympathizer in Johnson’s cabinet. But an ambiguity crept into the wording of the act. Cabinet officers, it said, should serve during the term of the president who appointed them— and Lincoln had appointed Stanton, although, to be sure, Johnson was serv- ing out Lincoln’s term.

The Military Reconstruction Act was hailed—or denounced—as the tri- umphant victory of “Radical” Reconstruction. The act declared that “no legal state governments or adequate protection for life and property now exists in the rebel States.” One state, Tennessee, which had ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, was exempted from the application of the new act. The other ten states were divided into five military districts, and the commanding offi- cer of each was authorized to keep order and protect the “rights of persons

674 • RECONSTRUCTION: NORTH AND SOUTH (CH. 18)

and property.” The Johnson governments remained intact for the time being, but new constitutions were to be framed “in conformity with the Constitu- tion of the United States,” in conventions elected by male citizens aged twenty-one and older “of whatever race, color, or previous condition.” Each state constitution had to provide the same universal male suffrage. Then, once the constitution was ratified by a majority of voters and accepted by Congress, other criteria had to be met. The state legislature had to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment, and once the amendment became part of the Con- stitution, any given state would be entitled to representation in Congress. Persons excluded from officeholding by the proposed amendment were also excluded from participation in the process.

Johnson reluctantly appointed military commanders under the act, but the situation remained uncertain for a time. Some people expected the Supreme Court to strike down the act, and no machinery existed at the time for the new elections. Congress quickly remedied that on March 23, 1867, with the Second Reconstruction Act, which directed the army commanders to register all adult men who swore they were qualified. A Third Reconstruc- tion Act, passed on July 19, directed registrars to go beyond the loyalty oath and determine each person’s eligibility to take it and authorized district army commanders to remove and replace officeholders of any existing “so- called state” or division thereof. Before the end of 1867, new elections had been held in all the states but Texas.

Having clipped the president’s wings, the Republican Congress moved a year later to safeguard its southern program from possible interference by the Supreme Court. On March 27, 1868, Congress simply removed the power of the Supreme Court to review cases arising under the Military Reconstruction Act, which Congress clearly had the right to do under its power to define the Court’s appellate jurisdiction. The Court accepted this curtailment of its au- thority on the same day it affirmed the principle of an “indestructible union” in Texas v. White (1869). In that case the Court also asserted the right of Con- gress to reframe state governments, thus endorsing the Radical Republican point of view.

T H E I M P E AC H M E N T A N D T R I A L O F J O H N S O N By 1868 Radi- cal Republicans were convinced not only that the power of the Supreme Court and the president needed to be curtailed but also that Andrew Johnson himself had to be removed from office. Horace Greeley, the prominent edi- tor of the New York Tribune, called Johnson “an aching tooth in the national jaw, a screeching infant in a crowded lecture room. There can be no peace or comfort till he is out.”

Reconstructing the South • 675

Johnson, though hostile to the congressional Reconstruction program, had gone through the motions required of him. He continued, however, to pardon former Confederates and transferred several of the district military commanders who had displayed Radical sympathies. Johnson was revealing himself to be a man of limited ability and narrow vision. He lacked Lincoln’s resilience and pragmatism. He also allowed his temper to get the better of his judgment. He castigated the Radical Republicans as “a gang of cormorants and bloodsuckers who have been fattening upon the country.” During 1867 newspapers had reported that the differences between Johnson and the Re- publicans had become irreconcilable.

The Republicans unsuccessfully tried to impeach Johnson early in 1867, alleging a variety of flimsy charges, none of which represented an indictable crime. Then Johnson himself provided the occasion for impeachment when he deliberately violated the Tenure of Office Act in order to test its constitutionality. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton had become a thorn in the president’s side, refusing to resign despite his disagreements with Johnson’s Reconstruction policy. On August 12, 1867, during a congres- sional recess, Johnson suspended Stanton and named General Ulysses S. Grant in his place. When the Senate refused to confirm Johnson’s action, however, Grant returned the office to Stanton.

The Radical Republicans now saw their chance to remove the president. As Charles Sumner declared, “Impeachment is a political proceeding before a po- litical body with a political purpose.” The debate in the House was vicious. One congressman said Johnson had dragged the robes of his office through the “filth of treason.” Another denounced the president as “an ungrateful, de- spicable, besotted traitorous man—an incubus.” Still another called Johnson’s advisers “the worst men that ever crawled like filthy reptiles at the footstool of power.” On February 24, 1868, the Republican-dominated House passed eleven articles of impeachment by a party-line vote of 126 to 47.

Of the eleven articles of impeachment, eight focused on the charge that Johnson had unlawfully removed Stanton. Article 9 accused the president of issuing orders in violation of the Command of the Army Act. The last two articles in effect charged him with criticizing Congress by “inflammatory and scandalous harangues.” Article 11 also accused him of “unlawfully de- vising and contriving” to violate the Reconstruction Acts, contrary to his obligation to execute the laws. At the very least, it stated, Johnson had tried to obstruct Congress’s will while observing the letter of the law.

The Senate trial began on March 5, 1868, and continued until May 26, with Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase presiding. It was a great spectacle before a packed gallery. Witnesses were called, speeches made, and rules of order

676 • RECONSTRUCTION: NORTH AND SOUTH (CH. 18)

debated. Johnson wanted to plead his case in person, but his attorneys refused, fearing that his short temper might erupt and hurt his cause. The president thereupon worked behind the scenes to win over undecided Republican sen- ators, offering them a variety of political incentives.

As the weeks passed, the trial grew tedious. Senators slept during the pro- ceedings, spectators passed out in the unventilated room, and poor acoustics prompted repeated cries of “We can’t hear.” Debate eventually focused on Stanton’s removal, the most substantive impeachment charge. Johnson’s lawyers argued that Lincoln, not Johnson, had appointed Stanton, so the Tenure of Office Act did not apply to him. At the same time they claimed (correctly, as it turned out) that the law was unconstitutional.

As the five-week trial ended and the voting began in May 1868, the Senate Republicans could afford only six defections from their ranks to ensure the two- thirds majority needed to convict. In the end seven moderate Republicans and all twelve Democrats voted to acquit. The final tally was thirty-five to nineteen for conviction, one vote short of the two thirds needed for removal from office. The renegade Republicans offered two primary reasons for their controversial votes: they feared damage to the separation of powers among the branches of government if Johnson were removed, and they were assured by Johnson’s attorneys that he would stop obstructing congressional policy in the South.

Reconstructing the South • 677

The Trial of Andrew Johnson

House of Representatives managers of the impeachment proceedings. Among them were Benjamin Franklin Butler (Republican of Massachusetts, seated left) and Thaddeus Stevens (Republican of Pennsylvania, seated with cane).

Although the Senate failed to remove Johnson, the trial crippled his already weak presidency. During the remaining ten months of his term, he initiated no other clashes with Congress. In 1868 Johnson sought the Democratic presidential nomination but lost to New York governor Horatio Seymour, who then lost to Republican Ulysses Grant in the general election. A bitter Johnson refused to attend Grant’s inauguration. His final act as president was to issue a pardon to former Confederate president Jefferson Davis. In 1874, after failed bids for the Senate and the House, Johnson won a measure of vin- dication with election to the Senate, the only former president ever to do so, but he died a few months later. He was buried with a copy of the Constitution tucked under his head.

As for the impeachment trial, only two weeks after it ended, a Boston newspaper reported that Americans were amazed at how quickly “the whole subject of impeachment seems to have been thrown into the background and dwarfed in importance” by other events. Moreover, the impeachment of Johnson was in the end a great political mistake, for the failure to remove the president damaged Radical Republican morale and support. Nevertheless, the Radical cause did gain something. To blunt the opposition, Johnson agreed not to obstruct the process of Reconstruction, and thereafter Radical Reconstruction began in earnest.

R E P U B L I C A N RU L E I N T H E S O U T H In June 1868 Congress agreed that seven southern states had met the conditions for readmission to the Union, all but Virginia, Mississippi, and Texas. Congress rescinded Georgia’s admission, however, when the state legislature expelled twenty-eight African-American members and seated former Confederate leaders. The federal military commander in Georgia then forced the legislature to reseat the black members and remove the Confederates, and the state was com- pelled to ratify the Fifteenth Amendment before being admitted in July 1870. Mississippi, Texas, and Virginia had returned earlier in 1870, under the added requirement that they, too, ratify the Fifteenth Amendment. That amendment, submitted to the states in 1869, and ratified in 1870, forbade the states to deny any person the vote on grounds of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

Long before the new governments had been established, Republican groups began to spring up in the South, chiefly sponsored by the Union League, founded in Philadelphia in 1862 to promote support for the Union. League recruiters enrolled African Americans and loyal whites, ini- tiated them into the secrets and rituals of the order, and instructed them “in their rights and duties.” Their recruiting efforts were so successful that

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in 1867, on the eve of South Carolina’s choice of convention delegates, the league reported eighty-eight chapters, which claimed to have enrolled almost every adult black male in the state.

T H E R E C O N S T RU C T E D S O U T H

T H E F R E E D S L AV E S To focus solely on what white Republicans did to reconstruct the defeated South creates the false impression that the freed slaves were simply pawns in the hands of others. In fact, however, southern blacks were active agents in affecting the course of Reconstruction. It was not an easy road, though. Many former Confederates continued to harbor deeply ingrained racial prejudices. They resisted and resented federally im- posed changes in southern society. During the era of Reconstruction, whites used terror, intimidation, and violence to suppress black efforts to gain so- cial and economic equality. In July 1866, for instance, a black woman in Clinch County, Georgia, was arrested and given sixty-five lashes for “using abusive language” during an encounter with a white woman. A month later another black woman suffered the same punishment. The Civil War had brought freedom to enslaved African Americans, but it did not bring them protection against exploitation or abuse. Many former slaves found them- selves liberated but destitute after the fighting ended. The mere promise of freedom, however, raised their hopes of achieving a biracial democracy, equal justice, and economic opportunity. “Most anyone ought to know that a man is better off free than as a slave, even if he did not have anything,” said the Reverend E. P. Holmes, a black Georgia preacher and former domestic servant. “I would rather be free and have my liberty.”

Participation in the Union army or navy had provided many freedmen with training in leadership. Black military veterans would form the core of the first generation of African-American political leaders in the postwar South. Military service provided many former slaves with the first opportuni- ties to learn to read and write. Army life also alerted them to new opportunities for economic advancement and social respectability. Fighting for the Union cause also instilled a fervent sense of nationalism. A Virginia freedman ex- plained that the United States was “now our country—made emphatically so by the blood of our brethren.”

Former slaves established independent churches after the war, and such churches quickly formed the foundation of African-American community life. Blacks preferred the Baptist denomination, in part because of the decen- tralized structure that allowed each congregation to worship in its own way.

The Reconstructed South • 679

By 1890 there were over 1.3 million black Baptists in the South, nearly three times as many as any other black denomination. In addition to forming viable new congregations, freed blacks organized thousands of fraternal, benevolent, and mutual-aid societies, clubs, lodges, and associations. Memphis, for exam- ple, had over 200 such organizations; Richmond boasted twice that number.

The freed slaves also hastened to reestablish their families. Marriages that had been prohibited during slavery were now legitimized through the assis- tance of the Freedmen’s Bureau. By 1870 a preponderant majority of former slaves were living in two-parent households. One white editor in Georgia, lamenting the difficulty of finding black women to serve as house servants, reported that “every negro woman wants to set up house keeping” for herself and her family. With little money or technical training, freed slaves faced the prospect of becoming wage laborers. Yet in order to retain as much autonomy as possible over their productive energies and those of their children on a daily and a seasonal basis, many husbands and wives chose sharecropping, in which the crop produced was divided between the tenant and the landowner. This choice enabled mothers and wives to devote more of their time to do- mestic needs while still contributing to the family’s income.

African-American communities in the postwar South also sought to establish schools. The antebellum planter elite had denied education to

680 • RECONSTRUCTION: NORTH AND SOUTH (CH. 18)

The First African Church

Richmond, Virginia, 1874.

blacks because they feared that literate slaves would organize uprisings. Af- ter the war the white elite worried that education programs would encour- age poor whites and poor blacks to leave the South in search of better social and economic opportunities. Economic leaders wanted to protect the com- petitive advantage afforded by the region’s low-wage labor market. “They didn’t want us to learn nothin’,” one former slave recalled. “The only thing we had to learn was how to work.” White opposition to education for blacks made it all the more important to African Americans. South Carolina’s Mary McLeod Bethune, the fifteenth child of former slaves and one of the first children in the household born after the Civil War, reveled in the opportunity to gain an education: “The whole world opened to me when I learned to read.” She walked five miles to school as a child, earned a scholar- ship to college, and went on to become the first black woman to found a school that became a four-year college, Bethune-Cookman, in Daytona Beach, Florida.

The general resistance among the former slaveholding class to new edu- cation initiatives forced the freed slaves to rely on northern assistance or take their own initiative. A Mississippi Freedmen’s Bureau agent noted in 1865 that when he told a gathering of some 3,000 former slaves that they “were to have the advantages of schools and education, their joy knew no bounds. They fairly jumped and shouted in gladness.” African-American churches and individuals helped raise the money and often built the schools and paid the teachers. Soldiers who had acquired some literacy skills often served as the teachers, and the students included adults as well as children.

B L AC K S I N S O U T H E R N P O L I T I C S In the postwar South the new role of African Americans in politics caused the most controversy. If largely illiterate and inexperienced in the rudiments of politics, southern blacks were little different from the millions of propertyless whites or immigrants. Some freedmen frankly confessed their disadvantages. Beverly Nash, a black delegate to the South Carolina convention of 1868, told his colleagues: “I believe, my friends and fellow-citizens, we are not prepared for this suffrage. But we can learn. Give a man tools and let him commence to use them, and in time he will learn a trade. So it is with voting.”

Several hundred African-American delegates participated in the statewide political conventions. Most had been selected by local political meetings or by churches, fraternal societies, Union Leagues, or black army units from the North, although a few simply appointed themselves. The African-American delegates “ranged all colors and apparently all conditions,” but free mulattoes

The Reconstructed South • 681

from the cities played the most prominent roles. At Louisiana’s Republican state convention, for instance, nineteen of the twenty black delegates had been born free.

By 1867, however, former slaves began to gain political influence and vote in large numbers, and this development revealed emerging tensions within the African-American community. Some southern blacks resented the presence of northern brethren who moved south after the war, while others complained that few ex-slaves were represented in black leadership positions. Northern blacks and the southern free black elite, most of whom were urban dwellers, opposed efforts to redistribute land to the rural freedmen, and many insisted that political equality did not mean social equality. As an Alabama black leader stressed,“We do not ask that the ignorant and degraded shall be put on a social equality with the refined and intelligent.” In general, however, unity rather than dissension prevailed, and blacks focused on common concerns such as full equality under the law.

Brought suddenly into politics in times that tried the most skilled of statesmen, many African Americans served with distinction. Nonetheless, the derisive label “black Reconstruction” used by later critics exaggerates

682 • RECONSTRUCTION: NORTH AND SOUTH (CH. 18)

Freedmen Voting in New Orleans

The Fifteenth Amendment, passed in 1870, guaranteed at the federal level the right of citizens to vote regardless of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” But for- mer slaves had been registering to vote—and voting in large numbers—in state elec- tions since 1867, as in this scene.

African-American political influence, which was limited mainly to voting, and overlooks the political clout of the large number of white Republicans, especially in the mountain areas of the upper South, who also favored the Radical plan for Reconstruction. Only one of the new state conventions, South Carolina’s, had a black majority, seventy-six to forty-one. Louisiana’s was evenly divided racially, and in only two other conventions were more than 20 percent of the members black: Florida’s, with 40 percent, and Vir- ginia’s, with 24 percent. The Texas convention was only 10 percent black, and North Carolina’s was 11 percent—but that did not stop a white newspaper from calling it a body consisting of “baboons, monkeys, mules . . . and other jackasses.”

In the new state governments any African-American participation was a novelty. Although some 600 blacks—most of them former slaves—served as state legislators, no black man was ever elected governor, and only a few served as judges. In Louisiana, however, Pinckney Pinchback, a northern black and former Union soldier, won the office of lieutenant governor and served as act- ing governor when the white governor was indicted for corruption. Several

The Reconstructed South • 683

African-American Political Figures of the Reconstruction

Blanche K. Bruce (left) and Hiram Revels (right) served in the U.S. Senate. Frederick Douglass (center) was a major figure in the abolitionist movement.

blacks were elected lieutenant governor, state treasurer, or secretary of state. There were two black senators in Congress, Hiram Revels and Blanche K. Bruce, both Mississippi natives who had been educated in the North, and fourteen black members of the House of Representatives during Reconstruction.

C A R P E T B AG G E R S A N D S C A L AWAG S The top positions in south- ern state governments went for the most part to white Republicans, whom the opposition whites soon labeled carpetbaggers and scalawags, depending upon their place of birth. The northern opportunists who allegedly rushed South with all their belongings in carpetbags to grab the political spoils were more often than not Union veterans who had arrived as early as 1865 or 1866, drawn South by the hope of economic opportunity and other attrac- tions that many of them had seen in their Union service. Many other so- called carpetbaggers were teachers, social workers, or preachers animated by a missionary impulse.

The “scalawags,” or native white Republicans, were even more reviled and misrepresented. A Nashville editor called them the “merest trash that could be collected in a civilized community, of no personal credit or social responsibility.” Most “scalawags” had opposed secession, forming a Union- ist majority in many mountain counties as far south as Georgia and Al- abama, and especially in the hills of eastern Tennessee. Among the “scalawags” were several distinguished figures, including the former Con- federate general James Longstreet, who decided after Appomattox that the Old South must change its ways. He became a successful cotton broker in New Orleans, joined the Republican party, and supported the Radical Re- construction program. Other “scalawags” were former Whigs attracted by the Republican party’s economic program of industrial and commercial expansion.

T H E R A D I C A L R E P U B L I C A N R E C O R D Former Confederates also resented the new state constitutions because of their provisions allowing for black suffrage and civil rights. Yet most remained in effect for some years after the end of Radical Republican control, and later constitutions incorpo- rated many of their features. Conspicuous among Radical innovations were such steps toward greater democracy as requiring universal manhood suf- frage, reapportioning legislatures more nearly according to population, and making more state offices elective.

Given the hostile circumstances under which the Radical governments operated, their achievements are remarkable. They constructed an extensive

684 • RECONSTRUCTION: NORTH AND SOUTH (CH. 18)

railroad network and established state school systems. Some 600,000 black pupils were enrolled in southern schools by 1877. State governments under the Radicals also gave more attention to the poor and to orphanages, asy- lums, and institutions for the deaf and the blind of both races. Public roads, bridges, and buildings were repaired or rebuilt. Blacks achieved new rights and opportunities that would never again be taken away, at least in principle: equality before the law and the rights to own property, carry on business, enter professions, attend schools, and learn to read and write.

Yet several of these Republican state regimes also engaged in corrupt prac- tices. Bids for contracts were accepted at absurdly high prices, and public offi- cials took their cut. Public money and public credit were often awarded to privately owned corporations, notably railroads, under conditions that invited

The Reconstructed South • 685

How did the Military Reconstruction Act reorganize government in the South in the late 1860s and 1870s? What did the former Confederate states have to do to be read- mitted to the Union? Why did “Conservative” parties gradually regain control of the South from the Republicans in the 1870s?

States with Reconstruction governments Date of readmission to the Union Date of reestablishment of conservative rule

RECONSTRUCTION, 1865–1877

Military districts set by Reconstruction Act, 1867

Emancipation Proclamation, 1863

State action

Thirteenth Amendment, 1865

Means by which slavery was abolished

INDIAN TERRITORY

KANSAS MISSOURI

ILLINOIS IN OHIO

PA

WV

NJ

DE MD

KENTUCKY

MEXICO

0 100 200 Miles

0 100 200 Kilometers

1868 1870

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5

4

3

2

1

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1868

1870 1868

1870

1866 1868

1868 1870

1868

1870

1868

1869

TEXAS

1873

LA

1877

MS

1876

AR

1874

TN 1870 NC

AL

1874

GA

1871

SC

1876

VA

1869

FL

1877

influence peddling. Corruption was not invented by the Radical Republican regimes, nor did it die with them. Louisiana’s “carpetbag” governor recog- nized as much. “Why,” he said, “down here everybody is demoralized. Corruption is the fashion.”

T H E G R A N T Y E A R S

T H E E L E C T I O N O F 1868 Ulysses S. Grant, who presided during the collapse of Republican rule in the South, brought to the White House little political experience. But in 1868 northern voters supported “the Lion of Vicksburg” because of his record as the Union army commander. He was the most popular man in the nation. Both parties wooed him, but his falling-out with President Johnson pushed him toward the Republicans and built trust in

him among the Radicals. They were, as Thaddeus Stevens said, ready to “let him into the church.”

The Republican platform of 1868 endorsed congressional Re- construction. One plank cau- tiously defended black suffrage as a necessity in the South but a matter each northern state should settle for itself. Another urged payment of the national debt “in the utmost good faith to all cred- itors,” which meant in gold. More important than the platform were the great expectations of a sol- dier-president and his slogan, “Let us have peace.”

The Democrats took opposite positions on both Reconstruction and the debt. The Republican Congress, the Democratic plat- form charged, instead of restor- ing the Union had “so far as in its power, dissolved it, and subjected ten states, in the time of profound peace, to military despotism and

686 • RECONSTRUCTION: NORTH AND SOUTH (CH. 18)

The Working-Man’s Banner

This campaign banner makes reference to the working-class origins of Ulysses S. Grant and his vice-presidential candidate, Henry Wilson, by depicting Grant as a tanner and Wilson as a shoemaker.

Negro supremacy.” As for the federal debt, the party endorsed Representative George H. Pendleton’s “Ohio idea” that, since most war bonds had been bought with depreciated greenbacks, they should be paid off in greenbacks. With no conspicuously available candidate in sight, the Democratic conven- tion turned to Horatio Seymour, war governor of New York and chairman of the convention. His friends had to hustle him out of the hall to prevent his withdrawal. Seymour neither sought nor embraced the nomination, leading opponents to call him “the Great Decliner.” Yet the Democrats made a closer race of it than the electoral vote revealed. Eight states, including New York and New Jersey, went for Seymour. While Grant swept the Electoral College by 214 to 80, his popular majority was only 307,000 out of a total of over 5.7 million votes. More than 500,000 African-American voters accounted for Grant’s margin of victory.

Grant had proved himself a great leader in the war, but as the youngest president ever (forty-six years old at the time of his inauguration), he was blind to the political forces and influence peddlers around him. He was awestruck by men of wealth and unaccountably loyal to some who betrayed his trust, and he passively followed the lead of Congress. This approach at first endeared him to Republican party leaders, but it at last left him ineffec- tive and left others disillusioned with his leadership.

At the outset, Grant consulted nobody on his seven cabinet appointments. Some of his choices indulged personal whims; others simply displayed bad judgment. In some cases, appointees learned of their nomination from the newspapers. As time went by, Grant betrayed a fatal gift for losing men of talent and integrity from his cabinet. Secretary of State Hamilton Fish of New York turned out to be a happy exception; Fish guided foreign policy throughout the Grant presidency. Other than Fish, however, the Grant cabi- net overflowed with incompetents.

T H E G O V E R N M E N T D E B T Financial issues dominated Grant’s pres- idency. After the war the Treasury had assumed that the $432 million worth of greenbacks issued during the conflict would be retired from circulation and that the nation would revert to a “hard-money” currency—gold coins. Many agrarian and debtor groups resisted any contraction of the money supply resulting from the elimination of greenbacks, believing that it would mean lower prices for their crops and would make it harder for them to repay long-term debts. They were joined by a large number of Radical Re- publicans who thought a combination of high tariffs and inflation would generate more rapid economic growth. As Senator John Sherman explained, “I prefer gold to paper money. But there is no other resort. We must have

The Grant Years • 687

money or a fractured government.” In 1868 congressional supporters of such a “soft-money” policy halted the retirement of greenbacks. There mat- ters stood when Grant took office.

The “sound,” or hard-money, advocates, mostly bankers and merchants, claimed that Grant’s election was a mandate to save the country from the Democrats’ “Ohio idea” of using greenbacks to repay government bonds. Quite influential in Republican circles, the sound-money advocates also had the benefit of agreeing with the deeply ingrained popular assumption that hard money was morally preferable to paper currency. Grant agreed as well, and in his inaugural address he endorsed payment of the national debt in gold as a point of national honor. On March 18, 1869, the Public Credit Act, which endorsed that principle, became the first act of Congress that Grant signed. Under the Refunding Act of 1870, the Treasury was able to replace 6 percent Civil War bonds with a new bond issue promising purchasers a return of 4 to 5 percent in gold.