American Stories

Living American History: v. 2: From 1865

Jason Ripper

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317477044
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Commerce international

This book is ideal for any introductory American history instructor who wants to make the subject more appealing. It's designed to supplement a main text, and focuses on "personalized history" presented through engaging biographies of famous and less-well-known figures from 1865 to the present. Historical patterns and trends appear as they are seen through individual lives, and the selection of profiled individuals reflects a cultural awareness and a multicultural perspective.

1

After the Civil War

Mary Ames and Emily Bliss (Used with permission of Documenting the American South, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Libraries.)

The Difficulties of Reconstruction

In the two decades after 1865, the recently reunited United States had to figure out how to be one nation again at the same time that the challenges of Southern society took center stage. What would freedom mean for African-Americans? Who would rule in the Southern states? Would it be the old coalitions of plantation owners, the same ones who had supported the Confederacy? Could traitors get pardons and become politicians and leaders of the nation they had recently abandoned?

From the vantage of 1865, no one could foresee the South’s future. Few white Southerners wanted a social revolution, while all African-Americans did. Presidents and congressmen had to navigate against the racket of competing voices calling out for mutually exclusive demands. In January 1865, General William Tecumseh Sherman issued Field Order 15, giving land to the freed people on the South Carolinian sea islands—awakening hopes for forty acres and a mule. The land allocations were subdivided into forty-acre parcels and the army also distributed worn-out mules. Freed families streamed to the islands and planted vegetables and rice. The land had been owned by white people who had deserted it early in the war, but the freed people argued that 200 years of hard labor had certainly earned them a right to some acreage. Within the year, President Andrew Johnson returned the lands to the former owners, overruling Sherman’s efforts and appeasing Southern whites.

Following Lincoln’s assassination, Andrew Johnson stumbled through three years as president, facing impeachment along the way for his opposition to Congress’s efforts to reform the South through constitutional amendments and civil rights laws. Johnson vetoed more than one law designed to secure civil rights for blacks. In the House of Representatives, a Radical Republican named Thaddeus Stevens, looking very dour and stern in his photographs, led the charge against Johnson’s interference with progressive racial policies in the conquered South. In the 1866 congressional elections, Republicans took enough seats to override presidential vetoes. Stevens’s brief popularity, however, could not overcome the blunders of fellow Republicans or the durability of white supremacy in the South.

Ulysses S. Grant became president in 1868 and miraculously lasted through two terms that included one scandal after another and a nation-shaking depression in 1873. The depression partly resulted from the Credit Mobilier scandal: various congressmen and other public officials had been siphoning off millions of dollars in public monies originally intended for a transcontinental railroad. But Grant had entered the White House with volcanic popularity. People liked his small-town simplicity. Besides, Grant had won the war. He was a hero who rarely let the attention go to his head. Grant enjoyed racing his carriage through the streets of the capital, and when he got stopped by a police officer for speeding, Grant insisted on being given the ticket and allowing his carriage to be impounded. But Reconstruction ate holes in his presidency.

In 1868, Grant ran under the slogan “Let Us Have Peace.” The sentiment could not overcome the civil war still raging in the South between African-Americans bent on gaining civil rights and ex-Confederates bent on maintaining supremacy. The most notorious group of domestic terrorists, the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), used every bloody means possible to keep African-Americans from voting. They lynched; they shot; they burned crosses and threatened. The white-hooded Klansmen were terrorists, and only one force could stop them—federal troops. Congress passed a law, the Force Act, enabling Grant, in 1871, to rush troops into the South where they arrested and imprisoned hundreds of Klansmen. White Southerners simply took off the white sheets and kept resisting Reconstruction. Radical Republicans like Thaddeus Stevens in the House and Charles Sumner in the Senate tried to do right by the freed African-Americans, but a reluctant, tired North and an intransigent white South prevented any long-lasting, structural changes to Southern society.

South Carolina briefly enjoyed a state assembly with more black representatives than white. Mississippi elected a black U.S. senator, and African-Americans filled ballot boxes with votes for Republican candidates throughout the late 1860s and 1870s. Ultimately, however, Southern whites reestablished political and economic control. Reinvigorated white racists “redeemed” the South by passing a host of unsavory laws called black codes, which permitted sheriffs, for example, to forcibly place the children of African-Americans into “apprenticeships” on neighboring plantations. Also, African-Americans left slavery with no money and no land. With freedmen too poor to buy their own property, sharecropping resulted, a system in which landlords made sure to keep their tenant farmers in a cycle of debt that prevented them from easily leaving. African-American sharecroppers continued to till land owned by their former slave masters. Slavery had ended but slave conditions continued.

In 1877, Rutherford B. Hayes took over the presidency. Hayes was not popular in the South, but an election debacle in 1876 earned him the necessary Southern electoral votes. Three Southern states, including Florida, had had their ballots challenged. The responsibility of choosing the president fell to a congressional committee, which picked Hayes. Although Hayes was a Union veteran and a Republican, his ascension to the presidency signaled the end of federal Reconstruction in the South. Hayes had no political capital to continue Reconstruction. After sixteen years of strife, most people in the North wanted to get on with their lives and stop hearing about all the problems in the South: Ku Klux Klan violence, voting fraud, disgruntled whites anxious over the loss of their property and workers. The freedmen had lost their allies. Not surprisingly, Northern whites allowed their Southern counterparts to resume lording it over Southern society.

Back in 1862, when the Civil War was still in an early phase, William Tecumseh Sherman had written to a Southern acquaintance, Thomas Hunton, with whom Sherman had attended West Point. Miffed at Hunton’s choice to hght for the Confederacy, Sherman conceded, “We are Enemies, still private friends.”¹ If Sherman could be “still private friends” with a traitor and a rebel, was it any wonder that a nation ruled mainly by white supremacists would return the South to the hands of its old masters when the experiment in Reconstruction seemed too tiring, too dangerous, and too little possible?

Reconstruction: Black and White

Freedom is choice. Slavery is the lack of choice. When slavery was banned throughout the United States with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, freed men and women made the most of their new circumstances. Some traveled across the states, looking for children, spouses, parents, and other family members who had been sold away. Some bought land or took the land of their former owners and kept on planting the same crops, herding the same cattle, but on their own terms, on their own time. Most white Southerners could not abide all this change, all this black freedom.

In 1865, a young former Confederate named Edwin McCaleb captured the exasperation and outrage that fellow whites felt. “We can never,” he exclaimed, “regard the Negro our equal either intellectually or socially.” McCaleb thought that if the South could have a “system of gradual emancipation and colonization our people would universally rejoice and be glad to get rid of slavery.” Instead, he predicted that “this sudden system of Emancipation, this spasmodic transformation of the ignorant Negro from a peaceful laborer who has been accustomed to have all needs [provided] to a self reliant citizen will paralyze the productive resources of the South.” While McCaleb railed against the loss of unpaid workers and the ensuing “famine” he expected, a deeper fear underlay his complaints: interracial mixing. McCaleb was certain that the federal government intended to encourage “miscegenation.” In that case, “if such a detestable dogma becomes a law we shall soon have a race of mulattoes as hckle and foolish as the Mongrel population of Mexico never content with their present condition.” ² Racism and economic concerns mixed in McCaleb’s mind into a desire to keep African-Americans subordinate and submissive. The Civil War had ended slavery, but left the slaveholder’s mind intact.

Southern whites like McCaleb saw few options, all involving intimidation, coercion, and a resistance to the Reconstruction policies being legislated by Congress. Abraham Lincoln had wanted to let the rebel states back into the Union without fuss or vengeance. Lincoln imagined forgiveness. His successor, Andrew Johnson, imagined one thing but did another. Johnson was from Tennessee, a Confederate stronghold. A member of the Democratic Party, he had been chosen as Lincoln’s running mate solely because the Republicans wanted to boost their support in the 1864 presidential race: Johnson could secure votes for Lincoln that Lincoln could not get by himself. Had anyone known Lincoln was going to be assassinated, greasy-haired Andrew Johnson would never have been chosen for vice president. As a Southerner and former slave owner, Johnson’s sympathies lay with the South, even though he detested the richest planters, whom he blamed for having caused the Civil War in the first place. By autumn 1865, half a year into his three-year presidency, he had shifted from promising to punish the South to essentially pardoning every former Confederate officer and legislator who begged or groveled enough. Under Johnson, it seemed, the South would not be reconstructed—it would be returned to the past. With Andrew Johnson in the president’s seat, Southern racists had only to sit back and wait.

As always, if African-Americans wanted something, they largely had to go about getting it for themselves. Granted, the federal government helped somewhat. In 1865 the Freedmen’s Bureau was established, headed by General Oliver O. Howard, described by historian W.E.B. DuBois as “an honest man, with too much faith in human nature.” Howard tried his best to provide opportunities and fairness for freed people while simultaneously doing what President Johnson demanded. Congress and the freedmen tugged Howard one way; the president pulled Howard the other way. The Freedmen’s Bureau sent teachers (mostly women) into the South, built schools for African-Americans, adjudicated labor disputes between white landowners and black workers, and tried to enforce the provisions of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, which provided basic civil rights, including voting rights, to all citizens, regardless of skin color. Although the Freedmen’s Bureau came under some criticism for doing as much to force black people back onto plantations as it did to get them wage contracts, the agency was as true a friend to the freed people as it could be, given the state of affairs in the nation in 1865. Here was what Howard and the Freedmen’s Bureau workers faced, in DuBois’s words: “Acurious mess he looked upon: little despotisms, communistic experiments, slavery, peonage, business speculations, organized charity, unorganized almsgiving,—all reeling on under the guise of helping the freedmen, and all enshrined in the smoke and blood of the war and the cursing and silence of angry men.”³ With only 900 officials assigned to deal with labor disputes, court cases, and reform throughout eleven Southern estates, the Freedmen’s Bureau was hamstrung from its start.

What the Freedmen’s Bureau could not do for African-Americans, many did for themselves. In August 1865, a Cincinnati newspaper printed a letter from a freedman to his former master. It was time for a white man to listen to a black man. Jourdon Anderson was a father, a husband, a laborer, and a former slave from Big Spring, Tennessee. Apparently, his former owner—Colonel Anderson—had sent a letter to Jourdon Anderson requesting that he and his family return to work at the Big Spring plantation, only this time they would be paid. Jourdon Anderson had other ideas. However, assuming his former owner was willing to pay the equivalent of a lifetime’s worth of back wages, Anderson was willing to let bygones be bygones. In a conciliatory, friendly voice, Jourdon Anderson teased and toyed with Colonel Anderson. “I suppose,” Jourdon began, that any would-be readers “never heard about your going to Colonel Martin’s to kill the Union soldier that was left by his company in their stable”—not exactly the kind of revelation a Southern man would want broadcast in 1865. Jourdon Anderson showed himself forgiving in the face of Colonel Anderson’s obvious lack of grace: “although you shot at me twice before I left you, I did not want to hear of your being hurt, and am glad you are still living.” Readers must have guffawed at the scenario: a gunslinging, homicidal plantation owner inviting a former slave to return to the plantation, “promising to do better for [Jourdon] than anybody else” could. Jourdon informed the colonel, “I have often felt uneasy about you.” And no wonder.

Getting down to business, Jourdon Anderson wanted to know exactly what wages the colonel proposed to pay. Life in Ohio was better, much better, than it had been in Tennessee. The children were going to school, Jourdon got paid twenty-five dollars a month, and overall the whole family felt “kindly treated.” If only Colonel Anderson could be more specific about the wages, Jourdon could “decide whether it would be to my advantage to move back again.” That was the crux of the issue: choice. Jourdon was free and doing well, but at least in the mock-serious world of the letter, he would consider a return to the plantation if the price were right. Therefore, Jourdon thought a display of the colonel’s sincerity, “justice and friendship” might establish the proper basis for a new relationship. A few simple calculations added up to the total amount due. “I served you faithfully for thirty-two years, and Mandy [Jourdon’s wife] twenty years. At twenty-five dollars a month for me, and two dollars a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to eleven thousand six hundred and eighty dollars.” One can imagine Colonel Anderson’s eyes bulging at the number. Pretending that the colonel would be disposed to see thejustice of the request, Jourdon wrote, “Please send the money by Adams’s Express, in care of V. Winters, Esq., Dayton, Ohio.” Finally, unwilling to continue the charade any longer, unwilling to let the colonel or readers of the newspaper think that forgiveness could be found in back wages or any other form of apology or restitution, Jourdon Anderson concluded the letter:

Here I draw my wages every Saturday night; but in Tennessee there was never any pay-day for negroes any more than for the horses and cows. Surely there will be a day of reckoning for those who defraud the laborer of his hire.

In answering this letter, please state if there would be any safety for my Milly and Jane, who are now grown up, and both good-looking girls. You know how it was with poor Matilda and Catherine. I would rather stay here and starve—and die, if it come to that—than have my girls brought to shame by the violence and wickedness of their young masters. You will also please state if there has been any schools opened for the colored children in your neighborhood. The great desire of my life now is to give my children an education, and have them form virtuous habits.

Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me.

From your old servant, Jourdon Anderson⁴

It is no great stretch to imagine that Colonel Anderson decided not to pay the eleven thousand dollars in back wages. It is no great stretch to imagine that Jourdon Anderson and his family remained in Ohio.

The freedom to choose a way of life that Jourdon Anderson touted in his letter was not consistently enjoyed by African-Americans throughout the United States in the wake of the Civil War. Before the war, only four states had given black people the right to vote. Public facilities in the North had been segregated, and although free in theory, Northern black people were not free to go to most colleges or to manage businesses owned by whites. The war gave reformers an edge, however. After hghting for emancipation, how could Northern whites continue with such obvious bigotry? Within a decade, voting rights were extended to black people throughout the North, and restaurants, theaters, and hospitals were gradually integrated. As Jourdon Anderson’s letter makes plain, education was seen as the golden key to opportunity.

The Civil War had accelerated two related trends: people moving to cities, and people working for wages. Factories expanded production during the war to feed and equip the soldiers. Commerce and trade increased, and the new jobs were mainly urban. In America’s cities, then, an education could make the difference between poverty and wealth. Farmers benefited from schooling but had never needed books or university professors to teach them how to plant and harvest. Doctors, lawyers, professors, teachers, engineers, bankers, and other wage workers either needed o...