Beyond Redemption

Race, Violence, and the American South after the Civil War

Carole Emberton

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780226269993, 9780226024271
• eBook ISBN: 9780226024301
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

In the months after the end of the Civil War, there was one word on everyone's lips: redemption. From the fiery language of Radical Republicans calling for a reconstruction of the former Confederacy to the petitions of those individuals who had worked the land as slaves to the white supremacists who would bring an end to Reconstruction in the late 1870s, this crucial concept informed the ways in which many people—both black and white, northerner and southerner—imagined the transformation of the American South.

Beyond Redemption explores how the violence of a protracted civil war shaped the meaning of freedom and citizenship in the new South. Here, Carole Emberton traces the competing meanings that redemption held for Americans as they tried to come to terms with the war and the changing social landscape. While some imagined redemption from the brutality of slavery and war, others—like the infamous Ku Klux Klan—sought political and racial redemption for their losses through violence. Beyond Redemption merges studies of race and American manhood with an analysis of post-Civil War American politics to offer unconventional and challenging insight into the violence of Reconstruction.

ONE

Reconstruction as Redemption

They shall build up the ancient ruins; they shall raise up the former desolations; they shall repair the ruined cities, the desolations of many generations.

ISAIAH 6:4

“What like a bullet can undeceive?”

HERMAN MELVILLE¹

The trial and execution of Mary Surratt was a spectacle to rival any in our present time. Found guilty of being one of John Wilkes Booth’s coconspirators in the assassination of President Lincoln, Surratt was the first woman put to death by the federal government. Along with four others on a blistering July day in 1865, Surratt mounted the gallows at the Old Capital Prison as throngs gathered outside the prison yard hoping to catch a glimpse of the execution. The crowd sweated and cursed, angry that only a select few Congressmen and military officials had been allowed inside. They had been willing to pay hundreds of dollars, some of them, to see justice done to one of the most notorious criminals of the nineteenth century. The fact that a woman was among the condemned only intensified their curiosity. Up until the moment the trap door was opened beneath her feet, few expected she would actually hang. Surely the president would pardon her. A special guard of federal soldiers was stationed nearby ready to usher the woman back to safety should a last minute reprieve be issued. But no reprieve came. As the executioner tied the cotton strips around her arms and skirt, to stop her legs from flailing and her petticoats flying up, the irony of the man’s concern for the dignity of the woman he was about to kill must have seemed a cruel joke to her supporters who steadfastly maintained her innocence to the last. Her daughter, who watched from below, collapsed with grief. For a brief moment, the five convicted assassins stood together with their nooses in place, “equal in justice.” But it was Mary Surratt’s last words that would ring in the ears of all those who watched the event or read about it in the following days: “Don’t let me fall.”²

Mary Surratt’s execution for her role in the assassination of President Lincoln marked a pivotal moment in the history of violence in the United States. Never before had the federal government put a woman to death, and the state’s exercise of its raw power over an individual citizen’s life was a cause of great concern to many—even those who believed Surratt to have been John Wilkes Booth’s “anchor.” Over the previous four years, the government had consolidated its vast economic, political, and legal authority to build the greatest killing machine ever assembled at that point in time, the Grand Army of the Republic. That consolidation did not go uncontested, and the work of justifying the consumption of hundreds of thousands of young men proved one of the most difficult aspects of waging civil war. What difference, then, could the death of one woman make? In the agonizing figure of Mary Surratt, gripped by fear on the scaffold, Americans recognized a part of themselves, also gripped by fear, not only of the secret plottings of wild assassins but also the seemingly unstoppable force of the nation-state. Like Surratt, they feared falling into a chasm of violence that seemed to open up beneath their feet, and they sought redemption from four long years of civil war. Government officials professed to close the chasm by punishing the “deep dyed villains” who had perpetrated the most egregious act of violence imaginable—killing the president. But could they close the chasm, or did they simply tear it wider? Advocates for Surratt’s execution argued that it opened a pathway to peace and national reunification. Justice, they argued, necessitated Surratt’s death, although horrible—as well as the punishment of others responsible for the war. Her supporters, on the other hand, decried her execution as “judicial murder” and condemned the government for enacting such “stupendous a retribution” for Lincoln’s death. Arguing that her conviction had been a foregone conclusion given the high passions surrounding the assassination, critics of the military tribunal that judged the conspirators believed the usurpation of civil due process made a mockery of the law. These competing interpretations stemmed from questions far greater than simply Surratt’s guilt or even the propriety of hanging a woman. The trial and execution of Mary Surratt and the other Lincoln conspirators was but one incident in a long and torturous history of the government’s efforts to control both the meaning and the means of violence within American society.

The Civil War problematized violence in new and frightening ways. Americans wondered if the war had so demoralized society that the war’s violent reverberations might still be felt long after it was over. It also implicated the national government in perpetrating violence so brutal that it called into question the legitimacy of the war and its outcomes, including emancipation. Unitarian minister John Weiss summed up the anxiety over the new forms of violence the war had created and their long-term impact on American society when he declared that the United States had become “the most dangerous country on the face of the earth.”³

As Americans emerged from the devastation of the Civil War, violence became central to their hopes and concerns about the nation. Violence had nearly destroyed it and continued to threaten the fragile reunion of North and South. Postwar Americans, however, were not concerned just with events in the defeated South. They were worried about the war’s effects on their own society and the growing power of the federal government. They also sought meaning in the war’s destruction. To many, the war had purified the nation, creating new opportunities to remake the United States into the ideal republic that they believed it was meant to be. Melinda Lawson argues that the Civil War “redefined the relationship between the individual and the national state, presenting the sate as a benefactor, no threat to individual Americans.” But that transformation progressed unevenly, for although many Americans viewed the war as fulfilling America’s redemptive promise, there remained considerable ambivalence with regard to the growing coercive power of the nation-state. While many looked to the national government as the new protector of individual rights, others feared that this new mission might endanger the republic rather than rejuvenate it.⁴

Reconstruction and Redemption are typically viewed as opposing forces, two endpoints on the timeline of the United States during the mid-nineteenth century. The former, historians tell us, denotes the efforts by freedpeople and their white allies to bring biracial democracy and free labor to the former Confederacy. The latter is the term chosen by white supremacists to lend religious as well as political legitimacy to their violent opposition to freedpeople’s quest for full citizenship.⁵ That white Southerners would choose such a word to cloak their hateful, undemocratic agenda rankles some, such as Vernon Burton, who refuses to allow the enemies of freedom the protection he understands as implicit in the word’s meaning. “Redemption,” Burton writes, is “a beautiful term of religious faith that would be a better label for the promising years from the early 1860s through the early 1870s than so grossly to misconstrue the decades that follow.”⁶

Burton’s point is well taken. The efforts to reconstruct the slave South were in no small part driven by the same evangelical ethos that had driven the antislavery movement and laid the foundations to a nascent conception of human rights. The language of perfectionism, purification, and atonement for the sin of slavery remained a vital component to the reconstructing impulse that would help Radical Republicans wrest control of the South from the more conservative elements in American government, including the president himself. The mingling of religious and political ideologies—nothing new to American politics—created a new civic theology that imagined the newly reinvigorated nation as a powerful protector of individual rights, an identification that would soon be codified in the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution. The martyred Abraham Lincoln would not be alone in his apotheosis. The iconography of this new civic theology elevated the institutions of American governance, its symbols, and some of its leaders to almost godlike status. To reconstruct the South was to redeem the nation.⁷

Violence remained central to this mission. One major aspect of the South’s so-called Redemption that Burton and other historians deplore was, in fact, integral to Reconstruction itself. In seeking redemption from the war’s violence, slavery’s brutal legacy, and the continuing upheaval in the postwar South, Americans confronted the unsettling possibility that more violence might be necessary in order to ensure the past four years of suffering and death would not have been in vain. Questions about the necessity of Confederate punishment and the use of other coercive methods to extract a modicum of contrition, humility, and regret from errant Southerners exposed the paradox of redemption: redemption from violence easily became redemption through violence. The language of redemption provided a thread that would run through the course of the 1860s and 1870s, uniting people who viewed themselves as enemies in a common dialogue about violence, its role in the political process, the limits of state intervention to protect certain classes of citizens from it, and the right of some of those citizens to employ it under certain conditions. While not everyone agreed on these issues, and much blood would be spilled in the process of addressing them, redemptive discourse made the tumultuous and violent decades of the 1860s and 1870s legible both for those who lived through them as well as for those of us endeavoring to understand them today.

Rituals of Redemption

The threat of rain on March 27, 1865, did not dampen the resolve of black Charlestonians to enact a dramatic and emotional performance of their redemption from slavery. Although General Robert E. Lee’s official surrender was still over two weeks away, Confederate forces had evacuated the cradle of secession a month prior as General William T. Sherman’s troops pushed northward from Savannah. The fleeing Confederate troops had set fire to the cotton warehouses, and flames had spread throughout the town, leaving much of the city a charred shell of its former self. Amid the rubble, however, the city’s black population gathered not to mourn the destruction but to celebrate it. A correspondent from the New York Tribune who witnessed the event stood in awe of the two-and-a-half-mile parade that snaked through Charleston’s streets from the Citadel Green and back again. “Upward of ten thousand persons were present,” he wrote in his report to the Tribune, “colored men, women and children, and every window and balustrade overlooking the square was crowded with spectators.” They carried a myriad of handmade banners bearing slogans such as “Our Past the Block, our Future the School” and “Massachusetts Greets South Carolina as a Child Redeemed (Wendell Phillips),” no doubt having been aided in their production by the sea of Northern missionaries already flowing into the lower South. Among the participants were companies of United States Colored Troops (USCT), some of whom had liberated the city and its inhabitants, as well as an impressive organization of Charleston’s black workingmen who carried the tools of their trades (the masons carried trowels, the barbers carried shears, the painters their paintbrushes, and so on) along with banners welcoming the Union forces to South Carolina. In claiming their place as skilled workingmen, the laborers rejected the characterizations of them typically associated with slavery. These laboring men wanted to be seen not as driven brutes but as the skilled and expert craftsmen they were. They marched to redeem their city and their place within it.

As profound as this statement was, it was not the most impressive, according to the Tribune correspondent. The “most original feature” of this “celebration of . . . deliverance from bondage and ostracism,” this “jubilee of freedom,” was a large horse-drawn cart carrying an auctioneer’s block and a black man reenacting one of slavery’s archetypal scenes. As the cart rolled through the streets following the procession of workers, the man performed a mock auction, ringing a bell and calling out to the crowd, “‘How much am I offered for this good cook? She is an ’xlent cook, ge’men . . . 200’s bid . . . 250, 300, 350, 400, 450, who bids 500?’” Behind the auction cart marched a solemn coffle of sixty men tied together at the wrists “on their way from Virginia to the sugar-fields of Louisiana,” representing the internal slave trade. That the actor playing the auctioneer and the men in the coffle all “had been sold in old times” spoke of the personal as well as collective redemption enacted in their movements. After the coffle came a hearse with the words “Slavery is Dead,” written on the sides with chalk. Fifty women dressed in black but “with joyous faces” walked behind the hearse in pretend mourning. Indeed, the black residents of Charleston and throughout the rest of the dying Confederacy became slavery’s pallbearers that spring. In similar rituals of redemption in cities and towns throughout the South, freed-people enacted “Jubilee”—their earthly deliverance from bondage like that of the Jews of the Old Testament.⁸

The assassination of President Lincoln on April 14 marred the celebratory atmosphere surrounding the Confederacy’s defeat. Spasms of shock and grief gripped Northerners as they mourned their president, more beloved in death than in life. Redemption continued to serve an important function, giving greater meaning to a seemingly senseless act of violence. “Redemption is a mystery,” confessed a Presbyterian minister to his congregation in Bedford, Pennsylvania, who wondered how Lincoln’s death could possibly fit into God’s plan for the nation’s salvation after four bloody years of war. Despite the difficulty in understanding how the Almighty could allow the death of the “Uniter and Liberator of America,” the image of Christ’s blood sacrifice, central to the Christian notion of redemption, proved useful. “Our national unity is perfected by the martyrdom of our President,” assured A. G. Thomas, chaplain of the Filbert Street Army Hospital in Philadelphia. Ministers like Thomas delivered funeral eulogies and remembrances that drew analogies between Lincoln and the great Redeemer, Jesus Christ, a comparison made easier by the fact that the assassination had taken place on one of the holiest of Christian holidays, Good Friday. That day became “the Good Friday of American Redemption,” according to one Baptist minister in Philadelphia. Others also spoke of Lincoln’s death as the nation’s atonement for slavery. Recalling Lincoln’s emotional second inaugural address some weeks earlier, in which he reminded the nation of the enormous debt it owed to freedpeople, Methodist minister Gilbert Haven remarked, “How sadly it prophesies his own fate! His too much be of the blood which God requires from the sword to repay that drawn by the lash.” For Haven, Lincoln’s death, like the war itself, was but another installment in the payment of that debt.

Haven also elevated Lincoln to a pedestal of American statesmanship once reserved only for the nation’s earthly father. In Haven’s eyes, Lincoln’s accomplishments put him on equal footing with, if not exceeding, George Washington. “The one liberated three millions of his own race from foreign despotism,” Haven said of Washington. “The other,” meaning Lincoln, “liberated another people than his own—four millions of bound and bleeding victims—from a despotism infinitely more horrible.” The United States thus had “two creators and redeemers,” Haven told the crowd gathered in Boston for Lincoln’s funeral on April 23, and “the influence of both shall go forth for the redemption and regeneration of all lands.”⁹

Other eulogies focused on the tasks still remaining before Congress if Lincoln’s martyrdom were to result in national redemption. Connecticut congressman Henry Champion Deming informed a meeting of the state legislature gathered in Hartford to mourn the “the elect of liberty” that he had died for “the redemption of a long suffering race.” Mingling political and religious imagery, Rev. Frank L. Robbins of Philadelphia believed Lincoln’s martyrdom had assured “the redemption of the liberties of mankind,” while Haven concluded that in death Lincoln had found “everlasting redemption and equal citizenship with the unfallen angels of God.” In their efforts to channel the nation’s grief and rally support for some legal guarantees for black civil rights, these ministers expanded the notion of redemption to include political as well as spiritual rejuvenation.¹⁰

The redemptive visions of emancipation and Lincoln’s martyrdom imbued the nation’s political culture with a new impetus toward institutional reform. The importance of this transition cannot be overstated. Reform movements in the United States enjoyed a long and varied history, seeking to perfect the human condition, and in some instances, institutions of law and government. However, there existed within the evangelical culture that spawned antebellum reform movements a tension regarding the state both as a target of reform work and its role in promoting perfectionist politics. Garrisonians viewed institutions as inherently corrupt and corrupting. They eschewed political parties, campaigning, and voting as means for reform. Suspicious of the government’s capacity for corruption and violence, they insisted that “moral suasion,” focused on individual atonement and purification, was the only way to enact true, lasting change in social behavior. Who could blame them? The history of political compromise and protection for slavery and the interests of slaveholders in the national government could be told as a kind of morality play about corrupting influence of power, greed, and self-interest. Although political abolitionists steadfastly opposed any further compromise on the issue of slavery’s expansion into the western ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Series Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Reconstruction as Redemption
• 2. The Politics of Suffering
• 3. Wounds and Scars
• 4. The Militarization of Freedom
• 5. Ballots and Bullets
• 6. The Violent Bear It Away
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index