The Fabric of America (38 page)

Thus, in the treatment of its conquered provinces, the United States encountered for the first time a conundrum that has frequently baffled it since—how could its values of democracy and freedom be imposed on an unwilling society?

There had been no need for an answer before the war. Within the frontiers of the Union, citizens and government had shared the same understanding that freedom was a universal right among white males, but conditional among other inhabitants. It had to be limited because constitutional liberty was grounded in the guarantees given to property, to which only white males had an absolute right.

Consequently when General William T. Sherman issued Field Order 15 in 1865 allocating approximately eight hundred thousand acres of coastland from South Carolina to Florida to freed slaves, he was taking a potentially revolutionary step. With the distribution of property came the rights that the Constitution so clearly guaranteed to all property owners. The Freedmen's Bureau, which was set up to look after their interests, understood the potential and campaigned vigorously for “forty acres and a mule” for each new freeman. Thaddeus Stevens introduced a bill to redistribute land confiscated from “traitors to the United States,” and had he been ten years younger, it might have been carried into law. It was, however, easier to remove land from the Plains Indians in the Nebraska and Kansas Territories than from the white rebels of Georgia and South Carolina. With Stevens's death in 1868, momentum for the colonization of the south dissipated, and within a few years the courts returned the land being farmed by black pioneers to its original owners.

The alternative strategy was to build an infrastructure and forcibly put in place a framework of democracy in the hope that it would take root. This program brought about the construction of eight thousand miles of railroad track, reform of the tax system, the rebuilding of roads, the provision of free education in four thousand new schools, the foundation of black colleges such as Fisk and Howard universities, and above all the participation of African-Americans in government and law. Around twenty thousand northern carpetbaggers came south to take part in these enterprises, and with the assistance of the Freedmen's Bureau, former slaves negotiated labor contracts, established ownership to land, and registered to vote. Together with the establishment of Union Leagues and the activities of scalawags, former Confederates who had switched allegiance, the outline of a political opposition to white supremacy could be seen.

For deep-seated cultural reasons it did not take root, but the most immediate was the resort to force rather than persuasion. In the face of militant resistance to the registration of black voters and the selection of mixed-race legislatures and courts, Congress created five military districts covering the south, commanded by generals exercising martial law. Although the number of troops was small—about eight thousand in total—the power of the military authorities was extensive. An average of about 20 percent of the adult white population were deemed ineligible to vote—up to 45 percent in Louisiana—because of continuing loyalty to the Confederate cause, against
about 10 percent of adult African-Americans. In Georgia, General Alfred H. Terry forcibly removed Confederate Democrats from the General Assembly in 1870, an action known as Terry's Purge, and replaced them with Republicans, including black legislators expelled earlier by their white colleagues. In Tennessee and New Orleans federal troops successfully confronted white lynch mobs, and the terrorist campaign of murder and intimidation mounted by the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist bodies was broken with the aid of federal agents such as the sinister Hiram C. Whitley, self-proclaimed “head of the secret service,” who claimed to have participated in two thousand arrests and to have sweated confessions from suspects with a loaded brass cannon pointed at their faces.

By 1870 these draconian methods had led all the secessionist states to accept the new amendments to the Constitution, allowing them to be readmitted to the Union by Congress. But with state rule restored, national interest waned rapidly, and not even the anguished pleas of Governor Adelbert Ames of Mississippi for federal troops to control armed white mobs in 1875 could persuade President Ulysses S. Grant to send them back. Any lingering enthusiasm in the north for intervention was killed by the economic collapse of 1873, and evidence of the corruption of some carpetbaggers such as Foster Blodgett, who plundered several hundred thousand dollars from Georgia's Western and Atlantic railroad. In the 1875 presidential election, both Republican and Democratic candidates promised to bring an end to Reconstruction, and the high tide of equal rights began to ebb.

It is difficult to fault the goals of Reconstruction, except for one. The desire for revenge was never far from Stevens's rhetoric. It condemned to failure any chance of winning the hearts and minds of those white moderates and pragmatists in the south who understood the need for social and economic change. The imposition of taxes on the South to pay for the war came on top of the estimated $4 billion costs of the abolition of slavery and the massive destruction caused by the fighting and by Sherman's march through Georgia and South Carolina. The burden satisfied the northern impulse to punish the south. It also exaggerated the bitterness of defeat in a society that might have responded to Lincoln's more generous instinct to give it a home in the new consolidated nation.

Without that generosity, Reconstruction appeared to many white southerners not as a matter of democracy but of Yankee imperialism. As late as the
1960s, Senator William Fulbright of Arkansas, a segregationist who also opposed the war in Vietnam, felt able to compare Reconstruction to American interventions overseas, in Cuba, Haiti, Latin America, and Southeast Asia, arguing that they all grew out of the same “strand of puritan intolerance.” While the United States saw itself playing “the role of God's avenging angel, the appointed missionary of freedom in a benighted world,” Fulbright wrote, those on the receiving end felt themselves to be the victims of a power intent on proving “that force is the ultimate proof of superiority.”

The reality that crippled the north's efforts to export liberty is that while the right to freedom may be inalienable, the enjoyment of it by everyone demands a complexity of cultural experience, social responsibility, and governmental structure such as only the north possessed. What Lincoln pointed to as an ideal to be struggled for over generations, Stevens's followers wished to impose at once as a finished article. As Fulbright suggested, it was not the last time such a mistake would be made.

As the federal government turned an increasingly blind eye to the south, a series of Jim Crow measures were initiated, bringing about segregation and the return of the old exclusive freedom that only whites could enjoy. In 1890 Mississippi Democrats under the leadership of Senator James Z. George introduced literacy tests that prevented 90 percent of African-Americans from voting, and six years later the Supreme Court ruled in
Plessy v. Ferguson
that the provision of racially divided facilities, disguised as “separate but equal,” did not conflict with the Fourteenth Amendment, thus ensuring that white supremacy would continue for another seventy years.

Yet even at that dire moment, a gleam of Lincoln's inclusive freedom could still be found in the dissenting opinion written by the incomparable justice John Marshall Harlan. “In the view of the constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens,” he declared. “There is no caste here. Our constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law.”

Even as his dissent was delivered, however, the United States was expanding far beyond the borders that Adams, Polk, and Gadsden had drawn. Whether Lincoln's demanding version of liberty or some more convenient variant of it would follow the flag outside the frontier was a question on which the Supreme Court would be bound to deliver its judgment.

. . .

Thomas Jefferson had written loosely of “an empire of liberty” that might one day enclose North and South America, but he did so when the United States was as much an idea as a nation. William H. Seward, the ambitious, outspoken secretary of state to both Lincoln and Andrew Johnson, was the first postwar statesman with the power to put the idea into practice.

In Henry Adams's vivid portrayal, he possessed “a slouching, slender figure; a head like a wise macaw; a beaked nose; shaggy eyebrows; unorderly hair and clothes; hoarse voice; off-hand manner; free talk, and perpetual cigar.” His hatred of slavery was only equaled in its intensity by his fierce ambition to see the United States expand beyond its continental borders. In the judgment of his colleague Attorney General Edward Bates, Seward was “an expansionist of hemispheric voracity.”

As a young senator before the Civil War, he sketched out his lofty ambitions to an admiring audience in St. Paul's Chapel, New York: “
I look off on Prince Rupert
's Land and Canada and see there an ingenious, enterprising and ambitious people, occupied with bridging rivers and constructing canals, railroads and telegraphs … and I am able to say, ‘It is very well, you are building excellent states to be hereafter admitted into the American Union.' I can look southwest and see amid all the convulsions that are breaking the Spanish-American republics, the preparatory stage for their re-organization in free, equal and self-governing members of the United States of America.”

In his most expansive mood, Seward could picture the day when American democracy and business would circle the world and bring about “the equalization of the condition of society and the restoration of the unity of the human family.” Peace gave him the chance to indulge his ambitions. In 1867, he made no fewer than three attempts to push the United States beyond its landbound frontiers. His first effort, to buy Denmark's Caribbean colonies of St. Thomas and St. John—today's U.S. Virgin Islands—failed, but he bounced back by annexing the Midway islands in the Pacific, and most famously agreed to buy Russia's loss-making colony of Alaska for $7.5 million.

Speaking to a ragged group of non-Russian settlers in Sitka in 1869, Seward predicted that the new land would be settled in the same way as in the lower states. “Emigrants from our own States, from Europe, and from Asia, will not be slow in finding out that fortunes are to be gained by
pursuing here the occupations which have so successfully sustained races of untutored men,” he assured his frontier audience. That pattern of expansion left no place for the Aleuts, Tlingit, and other Alaskans who “can neither be preserved as a distinct social community, nor incorporated into our society.”

His program belonged to the prewar era and so necessarily excluded native peoples from the guarantees of the Constitution. It contrasted poorly with the overtly imperial approach of the Russians, which protected native Alaskans and encouraged the work of Orthodox priests such as Father Ioann Veniaminov, compiler of the first dictionary of the Aleut language. Almost a century later, however, the inclusive democracy that had surprisingly triumphed in the Civil War would extend political power to native Alaskans in a way that would have been impossible for the Czar's officials to contemplate.

William Seward

Seward, however, had his eyes fixed on a larger prize. Ownership of Alaska was intended to squeeze Canada into the Union. This strategy was made clear to his Sitka audience by his repeated reference to the entire west coast of North America as a single unit, and his explicit warning that if British Columbia was not governed in the interests of the United States, “we can all foresee what will happen.” The intended annexation of Canada would be “free and spontaneous,” he promised, but his audience was left in no doubt about what he expected to happen. Nor were the British. Alarmed by his transparent ambition, and by a spate of terrorist attacks across the border by the Irish Fenian Brotherhood, they sent several thousand troops and a squadron of ships to bolster Canadian defenses.

Their alarm turned to anger when the Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner, as passionate as Seward in his hatred of slavery and no less of an expansionist, tried another tactic in 1867 to lever Canada inside the U.S. frontier. During the war, enormous damage had been caused to Union shipping by the Confederate raider
Alabama
, which had been constructed in Britain and was allowed to escape. Seward claimed $19 million in compensation, but Sumner, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, raised the stakes by demanding $2 billion, half the cost of the war, on the grounds that
Alabama
's rampage across the oceans had doubled the length of the war. As an alternative, Sumner coolly suggested that the United States would be prepared to accept Canada in recompense.

“If war was his object, and Canada were worth it, Sumner's scheme showed genius,” Henry Adams commented drily. “But if he thought he could obtain Canada from England as a voluntary set-off to the Alabama Claims, he drivelled.” An international tribunal awarded the United States $15 million, and only then were the claims to Canada dropped.