The Tenth Decade of the United States

V

ANDREW JOHNSON AND “MY POLICY”

ANDREW JOHNSON came to the presidency by an unfortunate road, and at an unfortunate time. Well as he had deserved of all Union men, sentiment, and political expediency, rather than conspicuous fitness, had led the Republicans to nominate him for the vice-presidency, and the stupidest of crimes had raised him to the higher office. All his life a Democrat, he thus found himself at the head of the Republican party when it was little disposed io concede anything whatever to the theories of the opposition. A Southerner, the victorious North, which now fully trusted him, looked to him to consummate its triumph over his own section and his own people. Without genius and without charm, he must bear comparison with the parts and the personality of Lincoln.

His own personality was, in truth, the chief of his misfortunes. Risen, like Lincoln, from poverty and obscurity, he lacked entirely that indefinable quality which in Lincoln made homely ways attractive and gave to homely speech eloquence and charm. In this, perhaps, he was measurably the victim of the aristocratic constitution of Southern societ. He had spent his youth in illiteracy. He had apprenticed himself to a tailor and had earned his bread at that undistinguished trade. He had lived the life of a common man among common men, in neighborhoods remote from the seats of Southern wealth and elegance. Throughout his political career, he had from instinct and principle antagonized the interests that dominated the South’s politics and the class that set its social standards. By crude force and a native aptitude for rough political warfare he had fought his way, step by step, to place and power. But he had not, like Andrew Jackson, profited by association with well-born and well-bred Southerners. Of their grace and distinction he had never acquired a trace; and yet he never attained, on the other hand, the right bearing of a self-made man, or learned how to win the personal liking and confidence of men of the North. His manners were bad, his fibre was coarse, his disposition obstinate, his temper ill-controlled. Courage and honesty of purpose he had. But his courage was seldom tempered with discretion, his honesty of purpose was unaided by suavity or tact. He was the last man in the world to be accused of making the worse part appear the better. On the contrary, few men ever had so fatal a gift of making the better part appear the worse.

The apostles of temperance could hardly find in history a better instance to point their moral than the ghastly lapse that had marked his entrance into the vicepresidency. He had spoken but a few rambling sentences of his inaugural address when the distinguished company gathered in the Senate chamber perceived that he was not himself. The painful scene came to an end only when the clerk reminded him that it was time for the greater ceremony at the east front of the capitol. His unprepared utterances on the day he became president and for some weeks thereafter, although made when he was apparently sober, were hardly less unfortunate. Spoken while the whole North was deeply moved with an angry grief, and in need of no incitement to revengeful action, these discourses were mainly of the blackness of the sin of those who had risen against the Union. Treason, he kept repeating, was a crime, and must be made odious. At first his acts were in keeping with his words. One of the earliest was to proclaim Jefferson Davis and other Confederate leaders guilty of procuring the assassination of Lincoln. The charge against Davis, without other foundation than the improbable statements of men proved later to be no better than professional perjurers, taken with the equally false story that when captured he was disguised in woman’s clothes, went far to deprive him and his people of the respect which their courage and their misfortunes might otherwise have commanded from the North. Having ordered a military trial for eight persons against whom there was some real evidence of complicity with Booth, Johnson approved the commission’s findings and ordered four of the accused to be executed. One of the four was a woman, and the evidence of her guilt now seems far from conclusive.

Johnson had thus at the outset stimulated rather than soothed the bitterness of the North. His tone in private conversation, confirmatory of his public acts and speeches, also encouraged the men who had stood in Congress for a drastic policy with the South. Some of them had welcomed him to the presidency in the hope that he would correct what they deemed Lincoln’s fault of too great mildness with rebels; and Sumner, Wade, and Chief Justice Chase, the foremost radicals at this time in Washington, were soon confident that the new President would side with them against both the policy of Lincoln and that of the moderate Republicans in Congress.

For the radical group had advanced far beyond the position which Congress had taken the year before in its plan of Reconstruction, and far ahead of public opinion. As yet, only six Northern states — New York, and all the New England states except Connecticut — permitted their negro citizens to vote, and Congress had recently acquiesced in the denial of the suffrage to negroes in Montana territory and voted down a bill to give it them in the District of Columbia. But Sumner had been leading the way to the ultimate demand of the radicals, with such measures as those that secured for negroes in the District the right to testify in the District law courts and to ride with whites on the street cars, and by moving successfully for the admission of a negro lawyer to the bar of the Supreme Court of the United States. The proposal which he, Chase, and others now made was that the President, of his own executive authority, should cause the registration of freedmen and permit them from the first to take part in the setting up of state governments. When Johnson called his cabinet together, this plan was at once brought before him, and he found half his advisers — only Seward being absent —ready to accept it.

If appeared that at. Lincoln’s last cabinet meeting, on the day of the assassination, Stanton had presented a document whose history is the history of the transmission of Lincoln’s policy of Reconstruction to his successor. It was an order uniting Virginia and North Carolina in a single military district and committing to military officials, under the Secretary of War, the rebuilding of their governments. It ignored the Pierpont government in Virginia. After a brief discussion, Stanton was requested to prepare separate plans for the two states. Sunday evening, two days later, being in conference with Sumner, Colfax, and other radicals, he showed them the rough draft of an order for Virginia alone, and they objected that its terms denied the ballot to the freedmen. May 8, he presented it in the cabinet, and the next day lie presented the order for North Carolina. This last conferred the suffrage on all “loyal citizens,”and Stanton admitted that he meant the phrase to include negroes. On the plain question whether or not the President ought to permit negroes to vote in organizing a new government for North Carolina, the cabinet divided. Stanton, Dennison, and Speed voted yes; McCulloch, Welles, and Usher voted no. There can be little doubt that. Seward would have voted no if he had been present. Johnson reserved his decision; but that same day, the 9th, he issued the order for Virginia, so changed that it recognized the Pierponf government, the weakest of the four stale establishments already set up in the South. Twenty days later, the radicals and the country knew that he had decided against the proposal to confer the suffrage on the freedmen by executive authority, and in favor of the milder policy of Lincoln. May 29, he issued two proclamations. In the first he confirmed the terms of pardon Lincoln had offered to the Confederates, merely increasing the number of the excepted classes. One of the classes which he added included all supporters of the Confederacy who possessed property of the value of twenty thousand dollars, —a natural expression of Johnson’s own hostility to the old rulers of the South, and of his conviction that the insurrection had been “a rich man’s war, but a poor man’s fight.” In the second proclamation he named William W. Holden “provisional governor” of North Carolina, and instructed him to enroll all the white citizens of the state who would take the oath of allegiance to the Union, to the end that they might hold a convention and set up a government by substantially the same process Lincoln had suggested. To the convention itself Johnson left the fixing of the permanent qualifications of voters.

Within six weeks he set the same machinery going in all the states of the Confederacy except the four — Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Louisiana — in which Union governments of a kind already existed; and these establishments he left as they were. Save that he called the governors he appointed “provisional ” instead of “military,” he stuck to Lincoln’s plan. But he did not, like Lincoln, offer it to the free choice of the Southern people; he enforced it, permitting no alternative. Bv the time Congress assembled in December, every one of the states lately in insurrection had begun on the programme, and most of them had completed it.

Until Congress should pass upon the process and its results,the Southern question was left to tlie President, in control of the army and of the various executive departments, and to the Southerners themselves. In order that the plan of Reconstruction should attain its main objects and satisfy the North, the President must guide the process wisely and firmly, and defend it tactfully; and the Southern people must by their moderation, sense, and good faith justify his and Lincoln’s confidence and magnanimity. Johnson’s hope of overcoming opposition in Congress lay in conciliating Northern public opinion; and Northern people seemed, as a rule, disposed to view the entire subject with open minds. To the first announcement of the President’s policy, the response of the country was decidedly encouraging. The newspaper press for the most part inclined to support it. State conventions of both parties endorsed it, only the Republican conventions of Pennsylvania and Massachusetts dissenting. The only eminent men who at once came out in opposition to it were those who had already committed themselves against it; and of these only Sumner spoke hopefully of defeating it. For the time being, all apparently depended on the behavior of the South.

No judgment of the course of the Southerners can be just that does not take account of the woeful stale in which defeat had left them. The story of the home-coming of the soldiers of the Confederacy has been many times told in pathetic fiction and eloquent oratory; but neither invention nor eloquence is needed to win them the sympathy of generous minds. The plainest recital of the conditions under which they had to take up their lives is enough.

Out of nearly a million of men who from time to time had gone into the armies of the Confederacy, one fifth had never come back alive, and of the survivors perhaps one third had come back halt or maimed or broken in health.¹ New state governments were no sooner set up than they were called on to provide artificial limbs for thousands who had lost arms or legs. It seemed, some one has said, as if every other man one met limped or went on crutches or had an empty sleeve. Yet these crippled, worn-out veterans and their dead comrades had been the flower of the youth and manhood of the South. It was those who had borne the heat and burden of the war who must now take up the main burdens of peace. That they should at once take them up hopefully and cheerfully could not be expected. They would not have been human if in the overthrow of their proud hopes they had not for a little while bowed their heads in something like despair.

But the mass of the followers of the lost cause, men of strong English stock, were less given to bootless repining than to silent endurance and to masterful self-assertions against adverse circumstance. Of all the various classes of Southern society it was the returning soldiers who faced the new and strange situation most simply and candidly, and turned most manfully to the long task of building a new civilization out of the ruins of the old.

They found their women and children safe; so much they owed to the fidelity, or to the stupidity and the lack of spirit, of their former slaves. But of all else they had fought to defend and to preserve nothing remained as it had been. Were it possible to summarize in figures the material losses of the Southern people through the mere waste and the outright destruction of property during the long conflict, the totals would be appalling. Even the most humane of the Union commanders had found it necessary to destroy much property, and not all Union commanders had been always humane. Toward theend, Sheridan in the valley of Virginia, Sherman in Georgia and the Carolinas, and others elsewhere, had acted on the principle that in order to hasten peace war must be made unendurable. But the havoc wrought by the Northern armies was but a small part of the penalty of unsuccessful revolution. Far more widely devastating were the effects of the inter ruption of commerce with the North and the closing of the Southern ports to all foreign commerce ; and even the shrinkage in the wealth of the South directly due to these three causes probably did not equal the losses indirectly inflicted through the demoralization of her own industries.

Data concerning wealth and industry during the war are even scantier for the South than for the North; but enough exist to show plainly that the South, in utter contrast with the remarkable prosperity of the North, grew every day poorer and poorer. According to an assessment made by the Confederate government in 1861, the taxable values were in round numbers $4,221,000,000, slaves and real estate making up much more than half the total; and by 1864 even the optimistic Confederate Treasury department estimated that they had dropped to $3,000,000,000. The decline during the last year must have been still more rapid. Estimates of the losses of particular states, though not to be implicitly accepted, roughly indicate the fearful cost of the unsuccessful revolution. South Carolina, for instance, though little invaded until near the end, had paid heavily for leading in secession. According to one writer, out of her white male population of 146,000, fully 40,000 were dead or disabled, and three fourths of the taxable property within her limits, slaves apart, had been swept away — personal property by actual consumption, waste, and devastation, real property by depreciation in values. These figures are doubtless too high. But fairly trustworthy figures concerning particular schedules of property show a shrinkage of nearly one half, even in those contral purts of the Confederacy which were the Iasi to be invaded. It is not going beyond bounds to conclude that in four years the South had lost half its entire wealth, apart from its natural resources and not counting the slaves.

But figures, were they accurate and abundant, would paint nopicture of these devastated commonwealths. Only by a study of the daily life of the Southern people in war time, as it is exhibited in public records, diaries, newspapers, and reminiscences, can an American of the present day form any conception of the hardships they had endured before subjugation delivered them from their beleaguerment, or of the destitution in which peace found them. Eager as they had been for political independence, a few months of it must have taught them their inability to stand industrially and economically alone. Accustomed to draw from the North and from Europe, in exchange for a few staple products, nearly all the commodities they consumed, they had neither the appliances nor the skill to supply their wants from their own abundant resources. They cheerfully practiced countless unfamiliar economies. For many products of foreign climes they hit upon curious substitutes. Instead of tea and coffee, they drank decoctions made of parched corn, chestnuts, sweet potatoes, and sassafras. Delicacies and luxuries they simply dispensed with. They also turned their hands to strange industries, and made a beginning in many lines of manufacture. Had the war lasted, they would soon,no doubt, have still more widely diversified their industries. But without machinery and without skill they could not make for themselves a tithe of what they had formerly imported. They could not replace the tools with which they cultivated the soil, or the rails and rolling stock of their railroads, or the furniture and domestic utensils of their houses, or the clothes they wore upon their backs. Their stock of manufactured articles of all kinds had, accordingly, steadily diminished. At the end, women used to silks and satins had learned to make homespun attractive. Men who had been wealthy were left with nothing but their Confederate uniforms or those of Union soldiers who had died in captivity. Mere discomforts and inconveniences, however, could be borne with patience, But it was another matter to see the sick suffering for the commonest medicines; and before the end the sternest of all tests of human fortitude had to be endured. In many quarters, the supply of food, such as it was, became insufficient. During the last two years of the war, what with the government’s taxes in kind and impressments, the narrowing of the cultivated areas, the discouragement of planters from these and other causes, the lessening efficiency of the railroads, and the collapse of the currency, famine hung over many communities. Richmond, Mobile, and other cities had their bread-riots. Had there been a really great city within the Confederacy, its streets would doubtless have presented spectacles as distressing as any that Paris witnessed during the French Revolution. Lee’s first request after surrendering his army was for rations to feed it. The first care of his veterans when they broke their ranks — a care that had driven many a brave man to desert before the surrender — was to find bread for their wives and children.

When at last strangers from the North and from Europe were permitted to traverse the extinct republic, they found everywhere the plainest signs of poverty, exhaustion, desolation. Ashes and gaunt chimneys marked the sites of public buildings and of all mills and factories that had supplied wants of the Confederate government. Many private houses also had been burned. For want of good money, trade had reduced itself to barter; for want of transportation, capital, and confidence, most forms of business and industry had come to a standstill. In the public square of every important town, or somewhere in the outskirts, a detachment of Federal soldiers was encamped, the flag and the blue uniforms, the reveilles and sunset guns, serving remind the dejected citizens that they were living under the eyes of their conquerors. It is but just to record of the great majority of the officers and soldiers of the North, that their behavior during the occupation was considera te and generous, so that the helpless people came to regard them as protectors. But in too many instances the rights of private property were needlessly disregarded. Private houses were sometimes occupied without warrant, sometimes despoiled of furniture, plate, wines, and even family portraits. Wherever colored troops were quartered, their presence humiliated and exasperated the whites and tended to demoralize the blacks.

The countrysides were no better off than the towns. Fences were torn down. Farming implements were worn out. All the live-stock was gone but. a few ill-fed cattle and lame or superannuated horses and mules. The wide fields lay for the most part unfilled and covered with weeds. No part of this new continent has ever worn a drearier aspect. Worst of all, travelers did not find the people taking energetic measures to repair the waste and ruin, but noted idle negroes wandering along the highways, flocking into the towns, and gathering about the Union camps, while the whites, unaccustomed to manual labor, seemed for the most part quite unable to cope with the situation. Apparently, neither whites nor blacks had as yet formed any clear notions concerning their industrial relations under the new order.

In this state of affairs the planters who had been at the head of the South’s industrial system felt that they faced the climax of their disasters. This, they held, outweighed all their other losses put together. To their minds, the emancipation of the slaves meant the destruction of private property to the extent of many millions of dollars.² But it meant far more than that. Much the greater part of the wealth in existence in any community at any given time is the product of the labor of but a few years. Destroy it, but leave the productive energy of the community unimpaired, and in a few years it will be replaced. But to the Southern planter it now seemed that he had lost, along with his wealth, the means and method by which it had been produced. However bravely he might turn to the future, the prospect that way was as disheartening as the desolation of his present, the defeat of all his past.

Free labor, it is true, was by no means unknown in the South. Every one of the states of the Confederacy had its “white" counties, inhabited chiefly by small farmers and mountain poor whites, where negroes were as rare as in any part of the North. But these regions might be neglected by any one who sought to understand the conditions that had always controlled, and would long continue to control, the South’s industrial life. To find these, one must still go to the fertile lowlands— the rice coasts, the river valleys, the Black Belt prairies — where slave labor had cultivated the South’s richest soils, grown its great staple crops, produced by far the greater part of its wealth. To take the place of slave labor in these quarters, there was no white agricultural labor available. To the land, well-nigh the sole possession left to them, the mass of the Southern people must still look for sustenance. From the land only could they hope to restore their fallen fortunes. Butt of what use was land without capital and without labor ? Money, although for the time being not to be had, might no doubt be attracted from the North or from Europe. As a matter of fact, the cotton exported within twelve months of Lee’s surrender sold for two hundred million dollars — considerably more than the crop of any single year had ever commanded — and of this sum, notwithstanding the seizures by the government and a heavy cotton tax now for the first time collected in the South, the greater part probably came back to the growers. But even with land and with money, the planters could not go on unless the freedmen could be got to do the work they had formerly done as slaves.

In this predicament of the Southern planter was the crux of the problem of Reconstruction. To the people of the North, intent mainly on completely destroying slavery as a law-made, law-protected institution, and on stamping out the last embers of insurrection, the problem naturally seemed rather constitutional and political than economic and industrial. But to the people of the South, anxious as they were about their political future in the Union, the question of their immediate industrial future presented itself in a still more imperative fashion. They must without delay find a way to go on; and hope as well as necessity spurred them to action and decision. For four years the cotton factories of the world had been waiting greedily for the end of the blockade. Could they now begin again to produce cotton in anything like the old quantity, they would reap extraordinary profits. It would have been strange indeed if, in all they were permitted to do toward the establishment of a new order, they had not considered first their industrial relations with the freedmen. The public men at Washington who were searching the Constitution for guidance in an exigency which it did not contemplate, debating the nature of statehood and the theory of the Union, and looking to conventions and legislatures to preserve what arms had won, would have done well to turn their eyes upon two figures: the Southern planter, who had never employed any laborers that were not. slaves, and the freedman, who had never served any employer that was not a master. Unless these two could “live themselves out of the old order,’’ the industrial system, the social usage, and the political ideals and practices of the South could never be conformed to Northern standards. At least one contemporary student of the situation saw this clearly. “I am convinced,” wrote Carl Schurz in the autumn of 1865, after three months spent in travel in the cotton states, “one good crop made by unadulterated free labor in the South would have a better effect than all the oaths that have been taken.”

But even Schurz, uncomplacent as he was with Southern ways, and by no means inclined to an over-lenient policy, was not surprised that the Southern people did not at once, because they were beaten in war, slough off their old civilization and endue that of the North. The habits of life of a whole people are hard to change. When the soldiers of the Confederacy laid down their arms, they surrendered in good faith. They had no mind to make any further resistance to the Union. Their politicians and orators had taught them to expect little mercy if they were conquered, and they had yielded only because all hope of victory was gone. Desperately as they had struggled for independence, within a few weeks of Appomattox there was not so much as a company left in arms. Only a negligible class of idlers and blow-hards were heard to breathe a word of defiance. Intelligent and responsible men put away all thought of it, while another class, — probably the largest of all, — passing into a mood of listless indifference, refused to take any further thought of anything but their own affairs. “A barrel of cider never ferments twice,” said one old Confederate whom Schurz asked if his people would not renew their insurrection if they got the chance. But their overthrow had not changed the Southerners’ convictions. To cease from all resistance to the Union, to give up forever the attempt to assert their claim of a right to secede, and to acquiesce in the emancipation of their slaves, — this was all they understood surrender to mean. They did not cease, nor did many pretend that they had ceased, to believe that they had been right. Their loyalty to the Union, said J. T. Trowbridge, one of the Northern men who went South soon after the surrender, was “simply disloyalty subdued.” Nor did they instantly lose their old dislike of Northern men and Northern ways and Northern speech. If on this point the returning soldiers, mindful of the courage they had encountered on so many battlefields and the kindly and humorous exchanges along so many picket lines, inclined to a milder tone, the non-combatants — particularly the women — were more than ever scornful of everything the term “Yankee” connoted. Least of all had they changed their attitude toward the blacks. To ask that they should was to demand the impossible. The former master could not, if he would, have instantly altered his bearing with negroes. The sense and the manner of superiority remained.

Nor could the negro instantly rise from his servility up to the full stature of freedom. In all but the mere fact of his emancipation, he remained a slave Nothing, indeed, in the whole long history of his bondage is more pathetic than his wondering entrance into his new estate.

It was probably some months after the surrender of the last Southern army before the slaves on the remoter plantations learned that they were free. Commanders of the Union armies and officers of the Freedmen’s Bureau were at much pains to spread the news among them. In some instances, they heard it incredulously. When Colonel Thomas Dabney of Mississippi called his many slaves about him and told them they must no longer address him as “master,” their reply was, “Yes, Marster,” “Yes, Marster.” Some, who had been well cared for under slavery, showed no great delight at the change. Few had any clear notion of what it meant. The majority conceived of it merely as a release from work, and imagined that their deliverers would support them in idleness. The law establishing the Freedmen’s Bureau provided that forty acres should be assigned to each family settled on confiscated or abandoned lands, and the phrase, “forty acres and a mule,” spreading rapidly, was taken for a promise of a general distribution of land and other property. Possessed with this hope, thousands left their homes and refused to enter into contracts with the planters or to do any more work than sufficed for a precarious existence. According to the recollection of the most distinguished member of the race, who as a boy witnessed and shared the great deliverance of his people, there was a general feeling that they were not really free until they had left their work and their homes, for a few days at least, “to try their freedom on.” Some also took new names, holding it inconsistent with freedom to bear any longer the names of their former masters. Those who, after a brief experiment of independence, went back to their old homes, and took service under their old masters, fared better than such as continued to hang about the towns and camps, waiting for the Christmas holidays, which they had fixed upon as the time for the distribution of land. Without money and without thrift and foresight, unaccustomed even to the care of their own health, and quite incapable of resisting temptations to self-indulgence, these suffered severely from privations and exposures. It was soon remarked that they now for the first time began to contract pneumonia, consumption and other diseases, from which in slavery they had been practically immune. It is estimated that within a short time the loss of life among them equaled the losses of the Southern whites in all the battles of the war.

Yet the fear of anything like conceded risings against the whites never came true. The freedmen’s ignorance, and their long discipline in humility, still kept them proof against the temptation to violence. They indulged in little or no rioting, and committed hardly any but petty crimes. They displayed a childlike trust in all who wore blue uniforms, and in the Bureau officers and others from the North. But until a later period, when ill-advised or unscrupulous white men incited them to insolence, they showed, on the other hand, no ill-will to the Southern white people who had been slave-owners. On the contrary, they still infinitely preferred whites of that class to poor whites and “half-strainers.” According to most observers, the old hatred between the lowerclass white man and the negro was at the bottom of nearly all the earlier outbreaks of violence between the races. As between the freedmen and their old masters and mistresses, countless instances of fidelity and affection on both sides lighten up the story of the South’s great humiliation. Idleness, vagrancy, petty thieving, and occasional drunkenness were the negroes’ chief offenses during the first year of freedom.

But idleness, and particularly their unwillingness to bind themselves to long terms of service, was precisely the offense which the planters, desperately desirous of saving the year’s crops, could least afford to condone. Northern men who, tempted by the high price of cotton, came South to try their hands at growing it, seem to have found at first less difficulty than the old slave-owners in hiring freedmen. Some Southern men also have testified that by fully recognizing the negro’s new rights, and consulting his interests, they got all the labor they needed. But the preponderance of evidence goes to show that 1hc mass of the freedmen continued, throughout the year 1865, averse to making contracts that would bind them to the plantations. “One day,” wrote a traveler who was in Mississippi during the Christ mas holidays, “it seemed that everybody was hi despair, complaining that the negroes would not work; the next, everybody was rushing to employ them.” But even when the time for the expected largess of the government had come and gone, many of the more densely ignorant still remained hopeful of some escape from the necessity of toil. As they were all accustomed to compulsion, it is not strange that few developed at once the thrift and the sense of responsibility for their own welfare which must now become their incentives to industry. Their conduct thus gave only too much support to the opinion, practically universal among the Southerners, that they would never work without some form of compulsion.

To deal with this phase of the situation was perhaps the most difficult and delicate part of the immense undertaking of the Freedmen’s Bureau. Congress had made no provision whatever for the Bureau’s support, but the revenues from confiscations and from abandoned lands went far to supply the deficiency, and army officers were freely assigned to Bureau duties. The number of agents and subagents rapidly increased, until, each being assigned to a special district or subdistrict, they exercised a fairly close supervision over the affairs of all the freedmen. The Bureau’s activities were many. It continued the policy of operating abandoned plantations, refusing to restore them to their owners until Johnson ordered the reinstatement of all owners who had taken the oath of amnesty or had received pardons. It distributed millions of rations among both races, for it treated the white Unionists as its charges equally with the blacks, and many destitute Confederates preferred to accept the bounty of the government rather than depend on private charity. It also dispensed the alms of charitable societies in the North and directed the missionary labors of men and women who volunteered their help. It set up hospitals for the freedmen, and provided medicines, It sought to secure them justice in the civil courls wlien these were established, and where there were no civil courts, or where these denied to freedmen the right to appear and to testify, it tried their causes in tribunals of its own. It made a beginning in the great task of educating them, but not a wise beginning, for it did not sufficiently adapt its teaching to their practical needs; of all the schools it planted among them, only a few of the higher institutions took root and grew. Its guardianship was particularly intimate, and particularly distasteful to the Southerners, when the freedmen came to make business engagements and enter into labor contracts. For the contracts it would have had the freedmen sign went far to thrust its agents into the places of the former masters.

To appraise fairly the work of the Bureau is difficult. The hostility it aroused among the Southerners was so deep, and has proved so lasting, that in their accounts of the period one finds it credited with nothing but evil. Its officials are charged with dishonesty, with incompetence, with encouraging the negroes in idleness by its almsgiving, with stirring up bad blood between them and the whites. They are also charged with having had, from the very first, selfish political ends in view. Before the surrender, the Union League, a patriotic order founded in the North, had spread widely among the Unionists and Union soldiers in the South, and had there taken on a much more partisan character than its founders had given it. As it early committed itself to the demand for suffrage for the freedmen, and as many of the Bureau officials joined it, helped to turn it into a political machine, and eventually helped themselves into office by means of it, the suspicion was natural that they had always had some such programme in mind. It is quite probable that the Southern people, in their undiscriminating jealousy of all interferences in their affairs, attributed to the Bureau some iniquities committed by men and agencies not in its control, — by treasury agents, for example, by traders and usurers who practiced their extortions in the neighborhood of the Bureau’s offices, and by the Freedman’s Bank. This institution, founded by philanthropists to encourage thrift among the negroes, and incorporated along with the Bureau, ended, through mismanagement and corruption, in utter failure, and several millions of dollars, the savings of thousands of freedmen from their first meagre earnings, were lost. But the Bureau itself made grave mistakes, and not all its officers were what they should have been. Grant officially reported to the President that some of them were unfit, and held them in part responsible for the negroes’ delusive expectation of a free distribution of land. A commission sent to inspect the Bureau’s working and results credited it with only an occasional and sporadic beneficence. A leading Northern senator, a Republican, declared that the government had given over the freedmen to the care of “broken-down politicians, and adventurers, and worn-out ministers of the gospel.”

But such sweeping arraignments as this last can hardly be just. No one of the Bureau’s critics seems to have denied that much of its work was necessary, or to have suggested any substitute for its machinery. Neither were all its officials either incompetent or dishonest. General Howard, the commissioner, though not a great executive or a shrewd man of affairs, was honorable and highpurposed, and most of his subcommissioners seem to have been men of character. The subordinate places did not offer either high pay or attractive duties, and it is no wonder if many of those who took them proved incompetent and unworthy.

Whatever the Bureau’s merits and shortcomings, it is unreasonable to hold it solely responsible for the failure of whites and blacks to find quickly a right and happy modus vivendi. If the Southern people were mistaken in their contention that the slaves could never be turned into free laborers such as the North knew, the North was quite as unwise when it imagined that the transformation could be accomplished in a day. Neither side seems to have studied the problem in the light of history, or to have profited by such recent object lessons as Russia’s experience with her liberated serfs, and Great Britain’s course with the emancipated blacks in the West Indies. If the North meant to force an instant transition from slavery to a system of perfectly free labor, then it should have made its will more clearly known, and the Bureau should have taken even more drastic measures than it did. For the South, in all its attempts to deal with the question, aimed from the first to establish a compromise system, intermediate between slavery and free labor. As a rule, the contracts which the planters first offered to the freedman would have bound him to the soil for the term of his service, and subjected him to a close control and to severe penalties if he left his work. In the same spirit, various towns and cities tried to put in force regulations intended to restrain his movements, to exclude him from certain occupations by requiring license fees, and thus to restrict him as of old to domestic service and labor in the fields. By voluntary combinations, it was charged, the old patrol system of slavery was also practically revived.

As early as June, 1865, the general commanding in South Carolina issued an orderforbidding contracts “ tending to peonage.” Bureau agents and other Northern men at once suspected a design to undo emancipation, and felt it their duty to intervene. Intervene persistently they did, but the government made no authoritative pronouncement on this most pressing and vital of all the questions of Reconstruction. North and South, disagreeing completely over the freedmen, were thus fast drifting into a misunderstanding as exasperating as any that had ever arisen over slavery.

For the South, finding its worst fears baseless, and cheered by the announcement of the President’s policy, was recovering from its first prostrate mood; and by a curious trait of human nature the reaction took the form of something like the old arrogance. To the proudest of all English-speaking people, lesser oppressions than they had thought in store for them began soon to seem intolerably unjust. Incautious expressions of public speakers and newspapers — praising Johnson, ridiculing Sumner and the radicals, and attacking the Freedmen’s Bureau — began to make their way to the North, where, unfortunately, wiser and more conciliatory utterances were, as a rule, unreported. Another sign of the reaction was the reappearance of the politicians, and of the old political divisions among the Southern people themselves. Many jumped quickly at the hope that, after all, the reserved rights of the states would be respected, and that the state governments, once reëstablished, would be left to fix the civil status of the freedmen. Men of the old ruling class, who had thought their ascendency gone forever, began to see their way to regain some part of it at least. The air grew a bit clearer of tragedy. After four years of passionate absorption in exciting experiences, the practical and the commonplace reasserted themselves, and ordinary motives of self-interest again held sway.

In August, while the reaction still lasted, the several states began to hold their conventions, ami the first to act was Mississippi, a state in which the planting interest was supreme. Her convention prohibited slavery and declared the ordinance of secession null and void; but the effect on Northern opinion was marred by speeches in favor of asking compensation for the slaves, and of repealing the ordinance instead of pronouncing it to have been null and void from the first. In a long telegraphic message, Johnson advised the convention to extend the suffrage to educated and property-holding freedmen. That course, he urged, would “completely disarm the adversary.” It would put the state in line with most of the free states, and foil the plan of the radicals to defeat Reconstruction by refusing seats to the representatives and senators from the South. But his advice was disregarded. The convention would grant no political rights to negroes. In the election of a legislature and other state officers, which followed soon after the convention, the main issue was whether freedmen should be allowed to testify in the courts; and not only did the party opposed to granting this privilege elect a majority of the legislature, but a Confederate brigadier, not yet pardoned, defeated for the office of governor an old-line Whig and anti-secessionist whom the convention had commended to the people. It was plain that in Mississippi the President’s policy had given control to men who had supported the Confederacy, and who did not propose to admit negroes to anything like political equality.

All the other conventions followed the lead of Mississippi’s. All after some fashion abolished slavery, and voided their ordinances of secession. Under pressure from the President, those of Georgia, Alabama, Florida, North Carolina, and Texas also repudiated the debts those states had contracted in aid of the Confederacy, — no slight concession to the demand for proofs of submission to the Union, for the loss would fall chiefly on men, already impoverished, whose guilt in the insurrection exceeded that of their neighbors only in that they had made greater sacrifices for the lost cause. But beyond this none of the conventions would go. Not one granted the ballot to a single negro. It was noted, too, that the majority of the men who sat in these bodies could hold their seats only by virtue of the President’s proclamation of amnesty, or because he had pardoned them. Nothing else could well have happened. In most of these states, there were not enough Union men to form a party, hardly enough to officer a government.

As in Mississippi, what may be called the Southern party carried all the elections which followed the conventions in the other states, and won control of all the new governments. The same party soon got control also in three of the four governments set up by Lincoln, while in Tennessee, the fourth, nothing kept it out of power but the act disfranchising all who had participated in the insurrection. It likewise named most of the representatives elected to Congress during the autumn. According to a law of Congress passed in 1862, before these could be seated they must take oath that they had never held office under the Confederacy or in any way aided and comforted the enemies of the United States; but of the successful candidates in the eleven states that, had been in insurrection at least fifteen had served the Confederacy in military or civil stations. When the new legislatures assembled, several of them chose United States senators who were likewise unable to take the “iron-clad” oath. Georgia, for example, sent Herschel V. Johnson, who had been a senator of the Confederacy, and Stephens, who had been its vice-president. “No man represents us who can take your test oath,” said more than one Southerner, truly enough, to Trowbridge.

It remained for the South to furnish the ratifications necessary to add the thirteenth amendment to the Constitution; for that was an unannounced part of the President’s programme. With the first clause of the amendment, which merely prohibited slavery, the legislatures made no difficulty. But the second clause, empowering Congress to enforce the first with any legislation it might think necessary and proper, excited fears. Might not this be taken to authorize federal control of all relations between white men and negroes ? Might not Congress perpetuate the Freedmen’s Bureau ? Might it not even decide that the negro needed the ballot to protect his freedom ? Mississippi refused to ratify. But on this point her lead was not followed. Alabama ratified, declaring that she understood the amendment to confer on Congress no power to fix the political status of the freedmen; and her assent, with that of Georgia and the two Carolinas, completed the three fourths majority of the states. Secretary Seward, when he came to proclaim the amendment in force, included these four states and the four reconstructed under Lincoln in the list of those which had adopted it, and thereby made a difficulty for the radicals, who wished to deny statehood to the reconstructed commonwealths, but disliked to question the validity of the amendment. The only way out of their dilemma was to argue that the approval of three fourths of the states that had never been in insurrection sufficed, since those alone were now states in the Union.

The South’s part in the programme being thus completed, it turned to the pressing question of the freedman’s place in the body politic and in industry. South Carolina led off with a general pronouncement. She designated her former slaves as “persons of color. ’ Her slave code, she declared, no longer applied to them. They should henceforth be permitted to hold property, to make contracts, to sue and be sued in the courts. But they could not have “social and political equality with white persons.” As one after another the reconstructed legislatures came to decide what civil rights the negro should enjoy, they all took practically the same stand. All granted him the right to marry within his own race. All permitted him to sue and be sued, plead and be impleaded, in the courts, and to testify in causes in which freedmen were involved. All vested him with the principal rights of property, and empowered him to make contracts, which must, however, be in writing, and attested by witnesses. But here concessions ended and discriminations began. No state granted him the right to hold office, or to enter the jury box. Several set up special tribunals for causes between him and his fellows or between him and whites. Only Tennessee permitted him to testify in cases involving whites. Mississippi would not let him hold land. Nearly all forbade him to carry firearms, and excluded him from militia service. All made certain acts criminal in him which in wdiite men went unpunished. All prohibited intermarriages between the races.

But the object which these legislatures, meeting in the autumn of 1865 and the following winter, had chiefly in mind, was to devise some plan to control the freedman as a laborer. Not all adopted the same measures, but they look the same general view of the situation and based their enactments on the same principle, — that white men should have the power to make the negro work. All accordingly provided that if he entered into a contract for a term of service, his employer could hold him to it. If he fled, he could be apprehended, fined, and on failure to pay the fine he might be bound over to the service of any white man who would pay it. Whoever sought to entice him from his work would encounter much the same penalties. To drive him into accepting steady employment of some kind, various devices were hit upon. If he were a minor, and either an orphan or the child of parents who failed to support him, the judge of probate must bind him over as an apprentice to some responsible white man, giving the preference to his former master. If he were an adult, and could show no visible means of support, or joined with others in a public meeting, or were guilty of any one of several acts considered menacing to society, he would be apprehended as a vagrant and fined; if, as was usually the case, he could not pay the fine, any one who desired his services could get them by discharging it. Another plan was to treat him in much the same way if he failed to pay his poll-tax; another, in Mississippi, to require that by a certain date he should have a home and a steady employment. Louisiana went so far as to fix a minimum working day of ten hours in summer and nine hours in winter. One or two states undertook, on the other hand, by heavy licenses or absolute prohibitions, to keep negroes out of certain of the more respected occupations.

These Black Codes, as they soon came to be called, all plainly aimed to make of the negroes a class almost as distinct from the whites as they had been under slavery. Inequality was explicitly declared and established. For the relation between the races which was contemplated, peonage is not perhaps the best term. It has been pointed out that nearly every law in the entire category had its counterpart in some ancient colonial statute which was still retained in the code of some New England state. But this merely proves that during the early colonial period apprentices anti hired men were less than free. The South had gone back two or three centuries to find precedents for what it wished to do, and had modified into a substitute for its old slave codes the law of an industrial system long since outgrown in England and in the North. A far better defense of the codes would be, admitting candidly that they looked to something like peonage, to argue that the negro was unfit for any more advanced system, and that to give him greater freedom woidd bring to a standstill every industry dependent on his labor. As the codes were framed to meet extraordinary conditions,— the expectant and hesitating attitude of the negroes, the unfortunate effects on them of the Bureau’s alms, their expectation of further benefits from the government, and the imperative demand for labor on the plantations, — it is competent also to argue that they were experimental and temporary. As conditions improved, the Southern states might conceivably have modified them. This view draws some support from the fact that within a year Georgia did extend to negroes certain privileges which she had at first denied them. But the single instance is not conclusive. By the spring of 1866 the South knew that the entire presidential scheme of Reconstruction was in jeopardy, and caution plainly dictated more lenient treatment of the blacks.

That this motive had not operated more strongly in the first instance remains hard to explain. The conventions had been incautious in ignoring Johnson’s advice to give the ballot to the few negroes who owned a certain amount of property or could read and write, in hesitating over the repudiation of their Confederate debts, in stickling over the language in which they disposed of slavery and the secession ordinances. The legislatures and the voters in Congressional districts had been incautious in sending to Washington so many men known to have taken part in the struggle for independence. But in the Black Codes the legislatures hail supplied the Union League and the radical leaders in the North with their best material for agitation. Only Mississippi had enacted hers when Congress met, but South Carolina had outlined her intentions and in several of the other states the measures finally passed were already under debate. The drift was plain. “We showed our hand too soon,” said a Mississippi planter to Trowbridge. Notwithstanding its terrible lesson, the South had seemingly failed to keep in mind its own probational status, or to reckon the consequences if it should arouse another Northern crusade in behalf of the negro.

Johnson, it is true, had shown in his efforts to guide conventions and legislatures none of Lincoln’s genius for persuasive control. He had erred, perhaps, in granting pardons too freely, in showing too plainly his own growing hostility to men high in the dominant party, and in permitting the Southern people to look to him as their champion. But to lay on him the blame for their temerity is unjust. It is more reasonable to attribute their course to other causes. They had a confirmed habit of disregarding or defying the public opinion of the rest of the country, nor had they yet learned to estimate it aright. Clinging to their old theories of the Union, they could hardly conceive of the lengths and depths to which, if radicals should come into control, the authority of the general government might be extended. Most of them, no doubt, believed the measures they were taking to be necessary. Moreover, their natural leaders, the men who had risen highest in the Confederate service, had been proscribed; and as a rule it was these men, the ablest in the South, who took the broadest and most candid view of the situation, and understood best the temper of the North.

But the Southern people had not chosen their course solely from a misconception of their situation. Had they known that what they did would bring upon them worse retributions than any they had yet endured, they might, indeed, have taken more pains to dissimulate their resolve, but they would not have abandoned it. They might have enfranchised a few freedmen, but sooner than consent to share with negroes the control of their affairs, they would have chosen to face whatever might betide. The North, for its part, would have been wise to consider well the kind and the depth of the resistance which was here revealed. To the very limit of conquest, the South was conquered, — its armies dispersed, its wealth gone, its merely political contentions utterly overthrown. But neither arms nor laws can compel men to live their daily lives according to the standards of a different civilization. To that end, only mild and slow processes ever have availed. There was still that in the prostrate South which mere force could not conquer, which only annihilation could destroy, — the white man’s pride of race.

Save as these successive steps in the working out of the presidential plan of Reconstruction serve thus to make plain the conditions with which statesmanship and philanthropy had to deal in the South, it is useless to dwell on them. As the time approached for Congress to assemble, no one could fail to see that nothing final had been accomplished. The Freedmen’s Bureau and the military commanders had from the first disregarded various acts of the new state governments. A little later, General Sickles in South Carolina and General Terry in Virginia, by military orders, expressly forbade the enforcement of particular state laws concerning freedmen. Johnson himself had not declared military government at an end anywhere in the Confederacy. That Sumner, Stevens, and Wade, with a strong following in Congress, would try to defeat the entire programme, had been apparent for months. These men had not waited for the South to speak before taking their stand; they had merely found in the impolitic acts of the conventions and legislatures what they took themselves, and could present to the country, for a confirmation of their view. As the breach between them and Johnson widened, they did not repress the bitterness they felt at what they considered his apostasy to the cause of human rights. They attributed the change partly to the influence of Seward and of certain personal friends; but they saw in it also the cajolements of those very slave-barons whom he had all his life opposed and envied. Themselves exasperated beyond measure to find these overthrown rulers of the South apparently in a fair way to regain their power at home, and perhaps at Washington also, the radicals could hold up to the fears of the North a start ling picture. Once seat the senators and representatives of the restored states in Congress, and would they not at once re new their old alliance with the Copper heads of the North ? Had they not already in the White House a Southern man, a Democrat, whom they had found a way to manage ? Who could guarantee that at the next election, or the next, some extraneous issue in the North would not send them allies enough to control Congress ? What then would forbid them to compensate themselves for their slaves, to repudiate the national debt, even to pay the debts of the Confederacy ? Would the North consent to commit both the fate of the negroes and the conduct of the national government to the very men who had tried to destroy the Union in order to keep the negroes in slavery ? For what, then, in the name of Heaven, had the war been fought ?

The drift of public opinion was not easy to follow. The Northern Democrats, there were signs enough, were inclining to support Johnson; and among the Republicans men of much influence still looked to him as the party’s leader. Morton, the war Governor of Indiana, was one of those who warmly defended him. Two voices as eloquent as Sumner’s, and as often raised in the long anti-slavery contest, now spoke out; boldly for generosity and moderation. Early in November, the provisional Governor of Alabama visited Boston, seeking a loan for his state, and addressed a meeting of prominent men. Sumner attended, and look occasion to attack the President’s policy and state the radical view of Reconstruction. But there were present also John A. Andrew, Governor of Massachusetts, and Henry Ward Beecher; and both rose and replied to Sumner. Beecher, from his Brooklyn pulpit, had called on the people of the North for magnanimity and for sympathy with the men who on the other side had made sacrifices as great as theirs, — and all in vain. “You know not what manner of spirit you are of,” he said to such as insisted that before the South should be forgiven it must show proofs of humility. He questioned the wisdom of trusting men who, after doing their best to destroy the Union, now made professions of loyalty, rather than those who in adversity still stood by their convictions. Like Johnson, he held that nothing the North could do for the freedmen would compensate them for the good will of the white people among whom they must live. Governor Andrew’s devotion to human rights no man could question. But he had early set himself to study the entire problem of Reconstruction. Not content with treating it simply as a constitutional question, he had gone to Washington to study Johnson. He had sought the acquaintance of Southerners, studied them, and learned what he could of Southern life. He alone among Republican leaders seems to have worked his way to a comprehension of the industrial problem which underlay the political. In the hope of bettering the economic situation in the South, he joined with a group of philanthropists and business men in a land company designed to turn Northern capital southward. In January, 1866, when he laid down his office, he devoted to Reconstruction, instead of the affairs of Massachusetts, a remarkable valedictory address. Rejecting Sumner’s theory that the Southern states had committed suicide, “Eccentricity of motion,” he declared, “is not death; nor is abnormal action organic change.” He defended the President’s moderation; pointed out that without the assent of the Southern people and the coo246;peration of their natural leaders, no stable order could be established in the South; and set forth the demands which the North could reasonably make in view of what the South could and could not concede. Since Lincoln fell on silence, no man had addressed himself to the subject so broadly, or in so noble a spirit. No man had spoken words that had in them so much of the essence of statesmanship.

But when they were spoken the Thirty - Ninth Congress had assembled. Both houses had refused to seat the representatives of the Southern states. The issue was no longer with the President, or the Southern conventions and legislatures, or the people of the North. The national legislature, long eclipsed by the executive, had determined to assert its control. The country turned from the White House to the Capitol, where two men rose above their fellows to a clear leadership — Charles Sumner in the Senate, and Thaddeus Stevens in the House of Representatives.