A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (74 page)

Emancipation had become constitutional law with the Thirteenth Amendment, which was ratified by the states in December 1865. This amendment abolished slavery as a legal institution, in direct terminology, stating:

 

Section 1: Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. Section 2: Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

 

As part of Reconstruction, Southern states had to incorporate the Thirteenth Amendment into their state constitutions before they would be readmitted to the Union.

Other wartime costs were sure to grow as veterans began to draw their benefits. Veterans lobbied through a powerful new organization called the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), founded by Dr. B. F. Stephenson in 1866. Organizing in “encampments,” in which prospective members underwent a Masonic-type review process, the GAR constituted a huge block of votes, usually cast for the Republican Party. GAR membership peaked at just over 490,000 by 1890, and for two decades was the voice of Union veterans, who, unless wounded, made a relatively seamless transition into American society. One veteran lieutenant returned to his Illinois farm and recalled that the day after his arrival, “I doffed my uniform…put on some of my father’s old clothes, armed myself with a corn knife, and proceeded to wage war on the standing corn.”
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War taught many enlisted men and officers important new skills. Building railroads, bridges, and other constructions turned many soldiers into engineers; the demands of communications introduced many others to Morse code and the telegraph; keeping the army supplied taught thousands of men teamster skills; and so it went. One Chicago print shop, for example, employed forty-seven former soldiers.
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Officers could capitalize on their postwar status, especially in politics, but also in a wide variety of commercial activities. Nothing enhanced sales like spreading the word that the proprietor was a
veteran.

Although the Union demobilized much of the army, there still remained a largely unrepentant South to deal with, requiring about 60,000 troops to remain there. Some units were not withdrawn from Florida and Louisiana until 1876. Moreover, as movement to the West revived, a standing military force was needed to deal with Indian hostilities. Nevertheless, by August 1865 a whopping 640,000 troops had been mustered out, followed by another 160,000 by November. Reductions in force continued through 1867, when the U.S. Army counted 56,815 officers and men. The navy slashed its 700 ships down to fewer than 250, essentially mothballing many “active” vessels, including several radically advanced ironclad designs already under construction.

If the combatants who survived benefited at times from their service, the economy as a whole did not. From 1860 to 1869, the U.S. economy grew at a sluggish 2 percent annual rate, contrasted with a rate of 4.6 percent from 1840 to 1859 and 4.4 percent from 1870 to 1899. The statistics give lie to the left-wing notion that business likes wars. Quite the opposite, the manufacturing sector went into a tailspin during the war years, falling from 7.8 percent annual growth in the twenty years prior to the war to 2.3 percent from 1860 to 1869. The economy then regained steam after 1870, surging back to 6 percent annual growth. In short, there is no evidence to support the position forwarded by Charles and Mary Beard that the Civil War was a turning point and an economic watershed.
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A Devastated South

Where the war brought radical change was in the South. Union armies destroyed Southern croplands and towns, wrecked fences, ripped up railroads, and emancipated the slave labor force. Carl Schurz, traveling through South Carolina, witnessed a “broad black streak of ruin and desolation—the fences all gone; lonesome smoke stacks, surrounded by dark heaps of ashes and cinders, marking the spots where human habitations had stood; the fields along the road wildly overgrown by weeds, with here and there a sickly looking patch of cotton or corn cultivated by negro squatters.”
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Columbia, the capital of South Carolina, was little more than “a thin fringe of houses encircl[ing] a confused mass of charred ruins of dwellings and business buildings.”
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At the “garden spot” of Louisiana, the Bayou Teche region, once-thriving sugar fields and neat whitewashed cabins were replaced by burned fences, weeds, and bushes. Around Atlanta, some thirty-five thousand persons were dependent for their subsistence on the federal government. Discharged Confederate troops drew rations from their former Union captors. One Southern soldier expressed his surprise to see “a Government which was lately fighting us with fire, and sword, and shell, now generously feeding our poor and distressed.”
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Captain Charles Wilkes, in North Carolina, reported “whole families…coming in from South Carolina to seek food and obtain employment.” “A more completely crushed country I have seldom witnessed,” he added.
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Large numbers of Rebels embraced the myth of the Lost Cause, no one more dramatically than General Jubal Early, who left for Mexico before concocting an organization to promote the emigration of ex-Rebels to New Zealand. Scientist Matthew Maury also attempted an ex-Confederate colonization of Mexico. Robert E. Lee urged reconciliation and accepted a position as president of Washington College (later renamed Washington and Lee University); yet Confederate Secretary of War Judah P. Benjamin, fearing he would be unfairly linked to the Booth conspiracy, left for England, where he died. John Breckinridge also fled to Europe, where he died in 1875. Confederate colonel William H. Norris, a former U.S. senator from Alabama, organized a group of emigrant Alabama families to relocate to Brazil at the urging of Brazil’s Emperor Dom Pedro II. Confederates colonized the Brazilian cities of Para, Bahia, Espirito Santo, Rio de Janeiro, and Santa Catarina. Americana, founded by Norris, only removed the Confederate battle flag from the crest of the city in 1999. Few took the course of Edmund Ruffin, a fire eater, who committed suicide. More common were the views of Amanda Worthington, a wealthy Mississippi plantation mistress, who complained, “We are no longer wealthy,…thanks to the yankees.”
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A bitter Virginia woman scornfully said, “Every day, every hour, that I live increases my hatred and detestation, and loathing of that race [Northerners].”
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Many pampered plantation women expressed disgust that they had to comb their own hair and wash their own feet. “I was too delicately raised for such hard work,” lamented one.
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Border states also suffered terrible damage stemming from the guerrilla warfare that pitted the Kansas and Missouri Jayhawkers against Rebels, spawning criminal gangs like the Quantrills and the Daltons. During the war, gangs established support networks of Confederate or Union loyalists when they could claim to be fighting for a cause, but that cloak of legitimacy fell away after 1865.

In both the Deep South and border states, the problem of maintaining law and order was compounded by the necessity to protect freedmen and deal with confiscated property. Authority over the freedmen fell under the auspices of a War Department agency, the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, established in March 1865. In addition to distributing medicine, food, and clothing to newly emancipated slaves, the Freedmen’s Bureau, as it was called, supervised captured Confederate lands. In one form or another most Southern property had supported the rebellion—the Confederacy had seen to that by confiscating most of the cotton crop for secessionist purposes in the last days of the war. After the war the Union took what was left, confiscating perhaps $100 million in total Rebel property and selling it; the U.S. government received only about $30 million. This reflected the lower real values of Confederate property, and it also revealed the fantastic corruption at work in the post–Civil War agencies. All Southern agriculture had been devastated. Cotton, sugar, rice, and tobacco production did not regain their prewar harvest levels until the 1890s. Southern per capita income fell 39 percent in the 1860s, and as late as 1880, per capita income stood at only 60 percent of the national average. As late as the Great Depression, the South had yet to fully recover parity in income. In fact, the South had started a sharp economic decline (relative to the Midwest) right after Lincoln’s first election.
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A comparison of income trends in the South and Midwest from 1840 to 1880 reveals that a slight but steady decline in relative Southern income in the 1850s cascaded into a thoroughgoing collapse in the year before Fort Sumter. These economic data, among other things, suggest the South was losing ground in the 1850s, despite a much superior banking system in some states and a slave labor system. Without the war, the South’s economy would have fallen further behind the North, despite the profitability of slavery itself.

Work crews repaired much of the physical damage relatively quickly. By 1870 most of the Southern transportation network had been rebuilt to prewar capacity, and manufacturing output grew by about 5 percent. In short, the view that the “prostrate South’s” position could be laid entirely at the feet of Yankee pillage does not hold water.
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Presidential Reconstruction

Even before the term “Reconstruction” existed, the process began at the instant Union troops secured a Confederate state. Tennessee, the first to organize under Lincoln’s 10 percent plan, had operated under an ostensibly civil government (with tight military supervision) since 1862. Johnson had run the state as its wartime governor until 1864, then a few months later, a state convention claimed constituent powers and issued amendments to the state constitution to abolish slavery and repudiate secession. W. G. “Parson” Brownlow was elected governor. Brownlow, whom the Confederacy had jailed when he refused to sign a pledge to the CSA, had shared prison cells with Baptist ministers who had committed “treason” against the Confederacy, one of them for shouting “Huzzah!” when Union troops came into his town.

Parson Brownlow was the epitome of what a “good Southerner” should have been by the Yankee way of thinking. Yet his presence in the governor’s mansion did not mollify Radical Republicans or convince them to treat newly elected Southern representatives to Congress with respect when they arrived to take their seats in 1864. After the election that year, Radicals unceremoniously refused to admit Southern congressmen at all, although the Senate allowed the senators from Tennessee (including Andrew Johnson) to be seated. But after 1865 neither the House nor the Senate allowed any Tennessee representatives (or those from any other former Rebel state) to take their seats, denying Southerners any constitutional representation. West Virginia, which had formed in 1862 after seceding from Virginia, was recognized only reluctantly.

Southerners were doing themselves no favors. They enthusiastically and foolishly elected numerous former Confederates to political office. Georgia’s legislature chose Alexander H. Stephens, the Confederacy’s vice president, as one of its U.S. senators; James Orr, South Carolina’s governor, had been a senator in the CSA; General Benjamin Humphreys was elected governor of Mississippi. Large majorities of the reconstituted state legislatures were ex-Confederates officeholders or military officers.

These actions outraged the Radicals, who threatened to turn parts of the South into a “frog pond.” In 1865–66, though, the Radicals were a disparate group with insufficient votes to enact their threats. Most Radicals shared the view that by virtue of their rebellion, Southerners had taken themselves out from under the protection of the Constitution. The South, the Radicals argued, was a “conquered province” (Sumner said they had engaged in “state suicide”). For nearly a year Johnson’s counterposition prevailed. Johnson hoped the hastily formed Unionist governments would be recognized and that Southern states following their lead would return to normalcy in due course. The reality was, however, that the vengeful congressional Radicals, led by Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens—“first and foremost, good haters,” as Paul Johnson observed—not only saw the former Confederacy as a festering bed of traitorous vermin to be decontaminated or extinguished, but also viewed the current occupant of the White House as completely illegitimate. A Democrat, Johnson had no leverage at all with the Republicans (least of all the Radical wing); a Southerner, he had no goodwill upon which to draw from either section, each for its own reasons eyeing him with suspicion. His only hope lay in attempting to reorganize the South quickly, in the Congressional recess, then proclaim it “done” before the lawmakers could return. That asked far too much of the South, where the majority of the population was in no mood to rush into a confession of sin. It also placed the unfortunate Johnson athwart a political structure that, for success, required skills far beyond any he possessed.

Understanding the agenda of the Radical Republicans is critical. They wanted not only to incapacitate the South as a region, but also to emasculate the Democratic Party, permanently ensuring its minority status. Indeed, many Radicals hoped the Democrats would die off entirely, like the Federalists had done decades earlier. There were two pawns in the struggle that emerged. One was the freedmen, whose fate deeply concerned many idealistic reformers in the Republican Party. At the same time, some Radicals cared not a whit about blacks, except insofar as they represented a mass bloc of voters guaranteed to loyally follow the party of emancipation. It was a view that defined people as groups and voting blocs, not individuals. In this way, first the Republicans and then seventy years later the Democrats would make a mockery of the principles of
individual
liberty for which Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, and Lincoln had fought.