The Record of Murders and Outrages

Racial Violence and the Fight over Truth at the Dawn of Reconstruction

William A. Blair

• Editorial: The University of North Carolina Press
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781469663463
• Categoría: History
• Categoría: American Civil War History

After the Civil War's end, reports surged of violence by Southern whites against Union troops and Black men, women, and children. While some in Washington, D.C., sought to downplay the growing evidence of atrocities, in September 1866, Freedmen's Bureau commissioner O. O. Howard requested that assistant commissioners in the readmitted states compile reports of "murders and outrages" to catalog the extent of violence, to prove that the reports of a peaceful South were wrong, and to argue in Congress for the necessity of martial law. What ensued was one of the most fascinating and least understood fights of the Reconstruction era—a political and analytical fight over information and its validity, with implications that dealt in life and death. Here William A. Blair takes the full measure of the bureau's attempt to document and deploy hard information about the reality of the violence that Black communities endured in the wake of Emancipation. Blair uses the accounts of far-flung Freedmen's Bureau agents to ask questions about the early days of Reconstruction, which are surprisingly resonant with the present day: How do you prove something happened in a highly partisan atmosphere where the credibility of information is constantly challenged? And what form should that information take to be considered as fact?

1: The Battle for Credibility

On February 19, 1867, Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts presented to his colleagues a chilling list of atrocities that had been committed against Black people in the conquered South. As chair of the Military Affairs Committee, he supplied evidence that the Civil Rights Act of 1866 was not being enforced and argued that the North needed to enact martial law to protect white and Black loyalists. Reading from “a little book,” the senator announced that 375 freedmen had been murdered from April to December 1866. Another 556 were the victims of “outrages,” a term for assaults, fraud, arson, robbery, rape, and other crimes. He broke down the violence by states, indicating widespread lawlessness while showing Texas as an epicenter for the tremors rocking the former Confederacy. Wherever possible, he named the perpetrators and victims.¹ Wilson’s data represented a change in how Radical Republicans in the Senate supported their arguments for military control of the South. Instead of referring to private letters from anonymous people or accounts from the partisan press, the senator relied on the Freedmen’s Bureau for the specific details of criminal behavior. He did so to counter the opposition’s tendency to dismiss news of atrocities as false.

For roughly a year and a half after the end of the Civil War, Republicans had tried to convince the nation that former Confederates were employing egregious acts of violence to maintain white supremacy and limit the changes wrought by the Union victory. But their efforts faced an uphill fight against racism in a divisive partisan climate. Democrats and some Republicans opposed those who sought to remake the nation’s racial order and refused to accept the reports of atrocities committed against Black people. Republican senator James R. Doolittle of Wisconsin was typical. A conservative who started out his political career as a Democrat, he insisted that fellow Republicans exaggerated the situation to discredit Southern governments. He called the reports of violence “absolutely, unqualifiedly, and wickedly false.” On the other side of the debate, Radical Republicans argued that the Johnson administration misrepresented information on outrages, understating them so that Northern Democrats could quickly restore their alliance in a national party with Southern whites. Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner, a leading Radical, just months after the war accused no less than the president of the United States of “whitewashing” news of atrocities.²

The political struggles over Reconstruction prominently featured arguments over the truth behind information. Republicans believed that racial violence presented an increasing problem. And yet no one had reliable data on the extent of atrocities, which left matters open for debate. Did the United States need to send troops into the former Confederacy to try to keep the peace as they forced on the South ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment and suffrage for Black men? Or were the rebels, as the Johnson administration alleged, acquiescing in the terms of reunion? Northern opinion sharply divided over whether the violence existed to the degree that demanded military intervention. News from correspondents in the South invariably fell along partisan lines, supporting the arguments of either side. Radical Republicans eventually reached out to the U.S. military stationed in the South to prove that they had their fingers on the pulse of the situation.

Wilson’s information came not from newspapers or anecdotal rumor but from a network of military officers and African Americans who bore witness to the atrocities committed by former rebels. The collaboration started at the grassroots level, linking freedpeople and local officers of the Freedmen’s Bureau. The chain extended to prominent military officers, including Ulysses S. Grant, the general- in-chief of the army, and Gen. Oliver Otis Howard, the commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau, all the way to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, who leaked it to the Senate. Together, these hands created a government collection known as the Records Relating to Murders and Outrages.

Peace left unresolved questions about the rebels: whether they had accepted the verdict of war about slavery and secession, whether they wished to rejoin the Union as law-abiding citizens, and whether they could live harmoniously with newly freed African Americans. Uncertainty existed about what Northerners called the “Southern feeling,” a shorthand for whether white Confederates had accepted federal authority. Abolitionists, Radical Republicans, and Northern Black people heard rumors that emancipation had escalated racial hostilities. Courts generally prohibited Black testimony against white people. It seemed important to Radicals that Black men voted not only because it was right but also because it gave them influence with state governments to protect their civil rights and personal well-being. Black manhood suffrage, supporters maintained, ensured that the old rebel element did not resume positions of power uncontested.

The ability of Southern whites to influence national affairs represented a real concern for Republicans. With their civic rights restored, former Confederates ironically gained political power through defeat. The Constitution had counted slaves as three-fifths of a person for determining representation in Congress. With emancipation, however, that rule no longer applied as Black people, now free, factored as full persons for calculating apportionment, causing the South to gain seats in Congress. If African American men remained disenfranchised, Black people thus augmented the national influence of former rebels, without having a voice in government. Robert Dale Owen, a noted Northern social reformer, fretted about this problem in a public letter. The result could be administration of the “secession portion of the Union, through the agency of its enemies.” Owen characterized the national attachment of these leaders as no more than “lip-loyal.”³ Republicans understood that the balance of national power could easily tip back toward Democrats supported by the enemy who had cost so many Northern lives.

In this atmosphere, both sides of policy debates viewed the other as using false rhetoric to mask underlying attempts to gain political advantage. Democrats especially became adroit at branding reports of violence as “cruel falsehoods of certain press correspondents” who misrepresented Southern whites for political and personal interests.⁴ They painted a portrait of compliant enemies who accepted defeat, recognized the reality of emancipation, and wished to move on with their lives in peace. They rejected as baseless the Republican newspaper stories about persecution of white Unionists and freedpeople. To them, the violence that existed represented nothing more than what occurred throughout the nation.

Republicans and newspaper correspondents had their doubts. Immediately after the war, however, many Northerners were uncertain about the “Southern feeling.” A hunger existed to know a range of news about former Confederates: the conditions of battlefields, the extent of destruction, the chances of economic recovery, and whether the war spirit still smoldered. Noncombatants had little direct exposure to the rebels during the war, and citizens in much of the country—predominantly rural and living in worlds often circumscribed by neighborhoods—had likely never been in the South. By the summer of 1865, various correspondents toured the region, writers looking to satisfy the demand of a Northern populace eager to learn about the people who had resisted them so fiercely for four long years. Invariably, these reports featured the writer’s sense of the rebels’ willingness to comply with the verdict of the war. The answer was mixed. One such account noted that in Charlestown, West Virginia—where Southerners had executed John Brown for his raid on Harpers Ferry—the people remained rebels and that the war feeling was “like a burning bush with a wet blanket wrapped around it.” To erupt anew, the fire simply needed more air.⁵

Sheer happenstance placed a federal agency in the position of gathering intelligence on the “Southern feeling.” Short for the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, the Freedmen’s Bureau served as a key source for reporting on conditions within the South. It did not begin with such a mission. Established in March 1865, the bureau aided the transition of African Americans from slavery to freedom. One of the first national social welfare agencies, the bureau fell under the auspices of the War Department and placed military officers in communities throughout the defeated Confederacy and in the border states. Besides overseeing the subsistence, education, work contracts, and health of freedpeople, officers also had responsibility for ensuring that justice was accomplished when civil authorities failed to act. This much had been outlined in Circular No. 5 of May 1865, which established procedures for assistant commissioners in charge of states. The agency, however, had not been given an official charge of supplying information that might affect the political situation. That came later.⁶

Some officers of the bureau sent to Washington news of horrible things that happened under their jurisdiction. They could not help but notice the wrongdoing around them. It often began with planters—now called employers—who failed to live up to the terms of free labor and refused to either make or honor contracts. Some, like a man in Virginia who threatened his former slaves, now freed, with death if they left and dared bureau officers to interfere. In this case, a military guard freed some of the former slaves but ran into an ambush while trying to reach others.⁷ This and other descriptions of coercion crept into the correspondence that made its way up from sub-assistant commissioners stationed in counties to the assistant commissioners in charge of states and then to Commissioner O. O. Howard, who supervised the bureau from Washington. The reporting was not as consistent as it later became. Officers did not follow a format, and they may or may not have indicated the particulars of outbreaks. As often as not, newspapers and politicians used the reports by military officers that described outrages in a general fashion, speaking of areas of concern rather than offering individual details.

Still, enough information flowed to the North from various sources to put Republican congressmen on alert that all was not well in the region. Reports came via newspaper clipping services—the exchanges that shared items reproduced verbatim from cooperating organs. Others came from private individuals, some of whom were Northerners hoping to settle in the region but feared for their lives. And then there was the Freedmen’s Bureau, whose communications and circulars also appeared in newspaper columns. Through these various means, Republicans and sympathizers of freedpeople learned distressing news about the treatment of Black people in the South.

Andrew Johnson also wanted to know more about conditions in the South. Throughout 1865 he sent emissaries there to report on what they found. Among the first was Carl Schurz, former Union general and Radical Republican.⁸ During a meeting in Washington about a month after the war, Schurz told the president that the government needed clarity about the Southern mood and someone to advise the administration in this capacity. Johnson had complained about the lack of reliable information and “being always obliged to act in the dark.” The president wanted to see how Southern whites embraced his policies that disenfranchised Confederate political and military leaders, as well as rich people worth more than $20,000. This was early in the process—before he employed widespread use of the pardon power that eliminated most political disabilities, allowing for a speedy reunion with traitors. He also was being pressured by the Radicals to promote Black manhood suffrage and probably wanted to hold them off by confirming his sense that good relations existed between whites and the freedpeople.⁹

Schurz warmed to the job as he recognized that his mission would undercut the president’s ability to say that he had crafted policies based on incomplete information. Stanton also encouraged him to assume the task, stressing its importance. Schurz remained in contact throughout his tour with Charles Sumner, who urged the ex-general not only to publish a report but also to deliver speeches on his findings. They hoped to pressure the president into adopting their position.¹⁰

While still in the South, Schurz tipped his hand about the nature of his forthcoming report. In five letters to the Boston Advertiser between July and August, he portrayed Southern whites in South Carolina and Georgia as incapable of functioning within a free labor system that required contracts and the autonomy of laborers to enter such relations. Southern whites, he wrote, doubted that the freedpeople would work without physical coercion. Violence did not dominate Schurz’s letters, but he did describe discord over a Black procession, and he depicted the region around Atlanta as rife with “negro-shooting.” He considered the former Confederacy unfit for resuming normal political relations and predicted that the underlying tensions promised that extensive violence lay ahead as federal troops withdrew.¹¹

The Democratic press characterized these reports, whether from Schurz or others, as fraudulent—designed to cover ulterior motives. The Albany Argus ran the headline “Misrepresenting the South,” claiming that “agitators” lied about Southern people’s resistance because the accusers intended to “keep alive sectional hatred, and drive the people into extreme measures.” When held to scrutiny, the writer maintained, the yarns proved to be “manufactured out of whole cloth to accomplish a wicked purpose.”¹² The Alexandria Gazette said Schurz’s letters were “calculated to do more injury than the Schurz mission is likely to do good.” It criticized him for failing to perform his mission quietly and for instead leaking his material to the public before reporting to the War Department. Former postmaster general Montgomery Blair was more pointed in charging “Stanton & Co.” with employing “swarms of hireling writers to misrepresent the South.” He considered Schurz “one of Stanton’s hireling writers” who tried to undermine the policy of the president.¹³

To head off the damage expected from Schurz’s final report, Johnson ordered Ulysses S. Grant to file an assessment of the Southern feeling. Somewhat reluctantly, Grant began the journey in late November and endured a superficial trip that featured only five days of investigation. Although he encountered Black people who cheered him along the way, he spent most of his time with white elites who feted him as they reassured him that the rebellion had ended and that they now tried to make the best of the situation. Grant did not have his heart in this visit. He made a perfunctory tour that fulfilled his duty but wanted to return home to his family as quickly as possible. In a letter to his wife, he foreshadowed his report by saying, “all seem pleasant and at least towards me, to and I thinks towards the Government, to enter faithfully upon a course to restore harmony between the sections.”¹⁴

As the Thirty-Ninth Congress convened in Washington in December 1865, a number of controversial elements came together that raised the ante on assessing the sentiments of the rebels. The first came with the decision to admit Southern representatives elected through new governments organized according to Johnson’s leniency. Most of the elections had restored to power the old guard. The South sent to Congress four Confederate generals, five colonels, and the vice president of the Confederacy.¹⁵ The Republican-dominated Congress refused to seat the newcomers. Meanwhile, new state governments in the readmitted states enacted Black Codes, which restricted African Americans’ travel, employment, meetings, and other freedoms while denying them the right to vote, to testify in court, or to serve on juries. To many in the North, it looked like the re-creation of slavery—and as if the rebels were winning the peace.

At the same time, Republicans formed a committee consisting of fifteen members (nine from the House, six from the Senate) to conduct its own investigation into Southern conditions. They could not have sent a clearer message of their mistrust of the president. All told, Congress called 144 persons to Washington, including former Confederate general Robert E. Lee. The panel probed whether the former rebels had accepted national authority. Congressmen also asked about the treatment of freedpeople and white Unionists. The inquiry concluded that without protection by the military, the freedpeople could not live safely, nor could “Union men, whether of northern or southern origin.” The committee added, “This deep-seated prejudice against color is assiduously cultivated by the public journals, and leads to acts of cruelty, oppression, and murder, which the local authorities are at no pains to prevent or punish.” To address this problem, the committee framed recommendations that became the basis for the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which enabled the federal government to enforce equal protection under the laws.¹⁶

Small wonder that on December...