A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (75 page)

A second group of pawns were the majority of white Southerners, who felt no less manipulated by the parties. Many of them may have wished charity from the victorious Union, but had no intention of giving any in return, especially to the freedmen. Most had supported the Confederacy and, therefore, in the strictest sense were traitors. Lincoln’s merciful policy, however, had insisted they be viewed as fellow citizens after they swore their loyalty to the Union. Swearing an oath did not change a lifetime of habits and prejudices, however. Few self-respecting Southerners could side with the Republicans, and thus they shut out their political options as surely as the freedmen had closed theirs. They marched in lockstep with the Southern Democrats, who were increasingly dominated by the most radical ex-Confederates.

By the time the Thirty-ninth Congress met, the Radicals had decided that no further cooperation with Johnson was possible. In December 1865, they enlisted six senators and nine representatives to investigate conditions in the South. Known as the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, this group was headed by Stevens and included congressmen John A. Bingham of Ohio, Roscoe Conkling of New York, and senators W. P. Fessenden of Maine and Reverdy Johnson of Maryland. Only three Democrats were on the committee, which planned its report for June 1866.

Meanwhile, Southern states’ readmittance constitutions outraged the Radicals. South Carolina, for example, rather than declaring the ordinances of secession null and void, merely repealed them, essentially acting as though they had been legitimate when issued. In addition, rather than abolish slavery in the state constitution, the former Confederates merely noted that slavery had already been abolished by the United States government, and Texas and Mississippi refused to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment. In short, the South Carolinians were neither chastened nor remorseful. Radicals decided to take action—and to remove Johnson as an obstacle.

Four Postwar Questions

Four issues emerged in the postbellum struggle over Reconstruction: (1) What economic compensation, if any, would be given to the freedmen? (2) What would their political status be? (3) To what extent would federal laws governing either economics or politics in the South be enforced and prosecuted? And (4) Who would determine the pace and priorities of the process—the president or Congress? Disagreement existed as to which of these four issues should take priority. Although Thaddeus Stevens cautioned, “If we do not furnish [the freedmen] with homesteads, we had better left them in bondage.” Frederick Douglass warned that it was the ballot that was the critical element. “Slavery is not abolished,” he noted, “until the black man has the ballot.”
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The first issue—that of economic compensation—was thoroughly intertwined with the question of amnesty for Confederates. Any widespread land distribution had to come from the former Confederates, yet to confiscate their property violated the Constitution
if,
after they had pledged their allegiance to the United States, they were once again declared citizens. Few, if any, freedmen thought equality meant owning a plantation, but virtually all of them thought it entitled them to the right, as Lincoln said, to eat the bread of their own hand. Some thought land would accompany Union occupation and emancipation. A caravan of freed blacks followed Sherman’s army through Georgia, and by the time he reached South Carolina, he actually sought to institute such a forty-acres-and-a-mule program with his Special Field Order No. 15. This set aside South Carolina’s Sea Islands for freedmen, giving each family forty acres and lending each an army mule. More than forty thousand freedmen settled on “Sherman Land,” but the policy was ad hoc, and not approved by Lincoln, who had the prospect of Reconstruction to consider.

Breaking up the plantations followed natural rights principles of recompense when someone profited from stolen property. As a Virginia freedman explained, “We has a right to the land where we are located…didn’t we clear the land, and raise the crops?”
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But a Republic did not confiscate property without due process, and the Constitution explicitly prohibited ex post facto laws. For the government to have proceeded to legally confiscate slave owners’ property, it would have had to charge slave owners with a crime—but what crime? Slavery had been legal and, indeed, Lincoln had been only a step away from a constitutional amendment giving it specific constitutional sanction. To have retroactively defined slaveholding as a crime, for which property confiscation was perhaps just punishment, would have opened a legal door to bedlam and, ultimately, terror. What would prevent any majority in the future from defining an action in the past as a crime for which some appropriate punishment was then needed? And had Southern land been handed over to the freedmen, no doubt future generations of white descendants of the plantations would have concocted their own proposals for reparations.

One option was to label all Confederates traitors, and
then
grant them conditional amnesty, based (in addition to the other requirements for regaining their citizenship status) on a partial proportional penalty of land to each slave owned in 1861. In 1865, however, the reality was that even the towering genius of Lincoln did not foresee the legal implications of failing to brand the Southerners traitors. Nor was there any political support—except among the vengeful Sumner-Stevens cabal—for such a policy. Sometimes there is no good solution to human problems. Certainly “reparations” merely reapplies ex post facto reasoning to modern Americans, the vast majority of whose ancestors did not own slaves and many of whom arrived in the country long after the Civil War.

Without a land policy, many freedmen soon fell into a series of contractual labor relationships with former owners (though often not their own) known as sharecropping. Under the sharecropping system—in which two thirds of all Southern sharecroppers were white—black and white laborers entered into agreements with white plantation owners who possessed land and farm implements, but lacked workers. Typical contracts gave the landowner 50 percent of the crop and the laborers 50 percent, although drafting a typical sharecropper contract proved daunting. Each contract was individually negotiated, including length, share, the nature of supervision, and so on. In some cases, “share” tenants provided their own tools, seed, and everything except the land, whereas in others, some freedmen worked purely as wage laborers.

Sharecropping has received rough treatment from historians, but less so from economists for a number of reasons. First, given the strengths and weaknesses of the former slave owners and freedmen, it represented a logical market solution, providing land and capital for laborers who lacked both, and a labor system for landowners without laborers. Second, the contracts were far more flexible and competitive than once was thought. They were not lifetime agreements, but temporary arrangements. Third, both parties had to work together to adjust to weather and market changes. Finally, given the lack of education among the freedmen, sharecropping minimized transaction costs while at the same time extended new levels of freedom and responsibility to the ex-slaves.
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Still, criticisms of sharecropping are warranted because it suffered from many deficiencies. Neither landowner nor laborer had an incentive to significantly upgrade land or implements. Rather, both had an incentive to farm the land into barrenness or to refrain from engaging in technological or management innovations that would improve productivity. Opportunities to gouge the sharecroppers (black and white) also abounded. In some regions, freedmen found it difficult to move about to take advantage of better contract terms. Data on the movement of sharecroppers suggests, however, that their movements correlated strongly with higher-paying contracts, so the implication is that sharecroppers knew where there were better conditions, and therefore monopoly situations occurred less frequently than some economic historians claimed.
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On average, though, sharecropping proved an excellent temporary market mechanism. Many freedmen did not
stay
in that situation, but moved on. Blacks acquired property and wealth more rapidly than whites (a somewhat misleading statistic, in that they began with nothing), and across the South they owned perhaps 9 percent of all land by 1880. In certain pockets, however, they achieved ownership much more slowly (in Georgia blacks only owned 2 percent of the acreage in the state by 1880) and in others, more rapidly.
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Robert Kenzer’s study of North Carolina showed that in five counties black ownership of town lots rose from 11 percent in 1875 to almost 19 percent by 1890, despite legal codes and racism.
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Black income levels also grew more rapidly than white levels (again, in part because they began with virtually no income as it is technically defined).

It bears repeating: racism and discrimination certainly existed and unquestionably took an economic and human toll on the freedmen. But to ignore their hard-won genuine gains, or to minimize them as mere exceptions, trivializes their contributions and achievements. Moreover, it does a disservice to the freedmen to automatically view them as laborers instead of potential entrepreneurs. Historians have tended to bury stories of black entrepreneurship after the Civil War. Yet many former slaves contributed important inventions and founded useful profitable companies in the postbellum period. Alabamian Nate Shaw, an illiterate tenant farmer, moved from farm to farm, expanding his share of the crop and renting out his mules to haul lumber or do other odd jobs. Despite competition from an influx of poor whites, struggles with unscrupulous landlords who tried to defraud him of his crops, and merchants reluctant to extend him credit, Shaw persevered until he became self-sufficient and headed the Sharecroppers Union, where as an older man he led protests against land seizures by sheriffs’ deputies in the 1930s.
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Fellow Alabamian Andrew Jackson Beard, born a slave in Jefferson County, found it too expensive to haul apples from his farm to Montgomery, whereupon he quit farming and constructed a flour mill in Hardwicks, Alabama. Experimenting with plow designs, he patented a plow in 1881, sold the patent three years later for four thousand dollars—a large sum at the time—and returned to inventing. By the 1890s, he had accumulated thirty thousand dollars and entered the real estate market, although he continued to invent, creating a rotary steam engine in 1892. He had worked previously on railroads, and he knew the dangers of joining railroad cars together—a process done entirely by hand, in which a worker would place a large metal pin in the coupling devices at exactly the right instant. Misjudgment cost railroaders their hands and fingers, and Beard himself suffered the loss of a leg crushed in a coupler accident. As a solution, in 1897 Beard came up with the famous Jenny coupler, reverse metal “hands” that fold backward on contact, then latch like hands shaking. Variants of the Jenny remain in use on railroads today, and over the years Beard’s invention has saved untold thousands of railroad employees from severe personal injury.
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The credit records for Virginia of R. G. Dun and Co., for example, reveal that of the 1,000 enterprises about which the company kept information between 1865 and 1879, more than 220 were black owned and operated.
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Although black businesses were usually located in areas of town with higher black populations, the advertising indicates that African American entrepreneurs appealed to white customers too. Almost 80 percent of the firms were single-owner operations, and these entrepreneurs quickly gained experience in the workplace. After 1869 the ratio of new to failed firms dropped, and even some of those that closed did so because the proprietor had died. In fact, the Virginia records showed virtually no difference in failure rates between black merchants and white merchants from 1870 to 1875, despite the presence of racism and prejudice.
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Attitudes of freedmen toward former masters spanned the spectrum. Some former slaves actually expressed anger at Union troops for killing and maiming their “young massas.” One South Carolina slave, seeing one of the master’s four sons return home from battle, “He jaw split and he teeth all shine through the cheek,” was “so mad I could have kilt all de Yankees.” Other slaves secretly celebrated when tragic news came to the plantation’s mistress: “It made us glad to see dem cry,” said one slave. “Dey made us cry so much.” News that a local leader of slave patrols had been killed touched off joyous shouting in slave quarters.
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On occasion, wartime hardships turned once-lenient masters and mistresses into monsters: one mistress, hearing of her son’s death, whipped the slaves until she collapsed of exhaustion. A Virginia slave observed that treatment of blacks grew harsher as the Yankee armies came closer.

Facing blacks now as tenants and sharecroppers, more than a few whites viewed their former chattel with suspicion: “The tenants act pretty well towards us,” wrote a Virginia woman, “but that doesn’t prevent our being pretty certain of their intention to stampede when they get a good chance…. They are nothing but an ungrateful, discontented lot & I don’t care how soon I get rid of mine.”
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Another owner in Texas—a “pretty good boss” as slaveowners went—made a huge mistake when informing his slaves of their emancipation, “You can jes’ work on if you want to, and I’ll treat you jes’ like I always did.” All but one family, “like birds…jes’ flew.”
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The Freedmen’s Bureau attempted to serve as a clearinghouse for economic and family information, but its technology was too primitive and the task too Herculean. Somewhat more successful were the efforts by Northern teachers, missionaries, and administrators to assist slaves in military and contraband camps by writing letters for freedmen trying to reach relatives. After black newspapers were established in the 1870s, advertisements frequently sought information on family members separated during slavery.