A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (76 page)

The influence of black educators like Booker T. Washington was still more than a decade away. Washington, the son of a slave, had just started his teaching career in 1875, as Reconstruction wound down. Founding the Tuskegee Institute, Washington hired faculty, established productive relationships with local whites, raised money, recruited students, and set about to teach printing, carpentry, botany, cabinetmaking, farming, cooking, and other skills that would assist freedmen and their children in gaining employment quickly. He obtained benefactions from Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and George Eastman, and suffered insults in order to advance his view of black success. Without ignoring racial discrimination and hatred, Washington nevertheless focused on encouraging African Americans to acquire property, get education, and to live with impeccable character. In time, he believed, relations would improve. At the Atlanta Cotton States and International Exposition in September 1895, Washington delivered a speech later noted for its ambiguity and elasticity. He seemed to accept the separate-but-equal Jim Crow doctrine of the day; yet he reminded whites that blacks were not going away, and that ultimately they had to work together.
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Freedmen and Politics in the South

The second major question involving the freedmen—their political status—was almost immediately put to the test when, at the end of the war, blacks began to move about the South freely for the first time. This churning of human movement struck every observer, including Northern army officers who witnessed train depots and country roads crammed with people. Hungry, sick, and barely clad freedmen clogged the roads between Vicksburg and Jackson. More than 125,000 slaves had been removed to Texas when the war started, and by late 1865 they were heading home up the San Antonio Road to North Carolina and Georgia. Although much of the wandering reflected a desire to express the freedom of movement suddenly given to the former slaves, more of the travel had the purpose of searching for family members or better work.

Regardless of the motivation, any movement by free blacks terrified whites and led to the first real clash between the federal and state governments over political rights in Reconstruction policies. As the new Southern governments, created by Johnson’s generous Reconstruction policies, started to function, they passed laws designed to place restraints on blacks in negotiating contracts, travel, and weapons and property ownership. Mississippi, after what Governor B. G. Humphreys called “six months of [the] administration of this black incubus,” passed the South’s first black codes in January 1866.
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The legislation required annual employment contracts, prohibited movement between counties without permission, and allowed local officials to arrest any black youth on charges of vagrancy if he did not appear to have a job.

The Mississippi black code was not entirely punitive. It recognized black marriages (something not done in slavery), legitimized the Negro’s right to sue in civil court, confirmed his right to property, and required that all contracts with freedmen of periods longer than a month be in writing. Some of the “guarantees” were meaningless. To freedmen, most of whom were illiterate and had never had any contact with the legal system or the courts, the right to sue was hollow. The provisions that stirred up the most revulsion among blacks, and which provoked the North to start down the road of congressional Reconstruction, involved the vagrancy provisions. Vagrants were to be fined up to a hundred dollars and imprisoned.
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Worse, if a freedman was unable to pay the fine, he could be hired out as an “apprentice” until his fine and court costs were covered.

Another set of laws, ingeniously devised by individual states, placed huge license fees on recruiters who came in from other states to lure freedmen to work for better wages. The only purpose of the statutes was to limit blacks’ freedom of movement and infringe upon their free right to contract. White state governments also received support from plumbers, barbers’ unions, and medical groups—all dominated by whites—who established a variety of tests to keep blacks out of their ranks. The U.S. Supreme Court, in the so-called Slaughterhouse Cases, finally ruled that if economic regulations did not explicitly discriminate, they were valid, and not until 1905, with the decision in the case of
Lochner v. New York
, did the Court reverse itself and bar certain types of discriminatory state, union, guild, and business regulation. It was a hollow victory for the freedmen, thirty years too late to do them any good.
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Black codes alone, however—even without the supporting labor regulations—sufficiently alarmed Northerners, threatening no less than a backdoor reenslavement of black men, and General O. O. Howard ordered his Freedmen’s Bureau to disregard the state laws. Northern newspapers editorialized against the codes, but their complaints did not stop South Carolina and Louisiana from enacting similar, though milder, versions of the black codes, and the towns of Opelousas and Franklin passed still more stringent measures. Florida, however, topped them all. By 1866, Florida’s population was nearly half black, and its white legislature teetered on the brink of paranoia. Florida laws required the death penalty for
burglary,
insurrection (except when the insurrection was by ex-Confederates!), and, of course, rape of (only) white women. Freedmen were allowed to have schools—but not at state expense. Blacks were denied the right to bear arms or assemble after dark, clearly violating the provisions of the United States Constitution. At the other end of the spectrum were the lenient codes of Tennessee and Virginia. But the black codes created a major backlash in the North. Some states repealed their black codes, but it was too late. By then, congressional Radicals were arguing that the codes were further evidence the South would never reform itself.

Associated with the imposition of the black codes was the birth and growth of the Ku Klux Klan. A Pulaski, Tennessee, white-supremacy group founded in 1866, the Klan held a regional meeting a year later in Nashville, where former Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest became its first Grand Wizard. Wearing white sheets and hoods—not only to conceal their identities, but, they thought, to play on the “superstitious” nature of blacks—Klansmen spread a reign of terror across the South, lynching blacks and any whites who might support them. The Klan also expressed its hatred of Catholics, Jews, and immigrants, often leaving its calling card—a burning cross—at a terror scene. Eventually the Klan spread nationally through the establishment of “klaverns” (local organizations), but it had its greatest nineteenth-century influence in Tennessee, North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. Other copycat white-supremacy groups followed: the White Brotherhood, the Men of Justice, the Constitutional Union Guards, and the Knights of the White Camelia. Mayhem and violence spread. Albion Tourgee, a Northern carpetbagger who became a North Carolina judge, “counted twelve murders, nine rapes, fourteen cases of arson, and over seven hundred beatings in his political district alone.”
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Tourgee’s novel,
A Fool’s Errand,
exposed in fiction some of the harsh realities of Klan terror in the South.

One of the bloodiest incidents occurred in 1873 at the Colfax, Louisiana, courthouse, where a white mob attacked armed blacks, killing more than one hundred and mutilating their bodies. The federal government, after indicting ninety-eight whites, convicted only three, and even those convictions were later thrown out by the Supreme Court in the
Cruikshank
decision, which said that the Reconstruction amendments only applied to governments, not the actions of individuals. Not only had the federal government failed to give the freedmen land, but it also failed to facilitate their self-defense.

If any agency could have addressed some of the needs of the freedmen, it was the Freedmen’s Bureau. Yet the history of the bureau shows it was not capable of dealing with the likes of the Ku Klux Klan or the black codes. Nevertheless, the Freedmen’s Bureau provides an object lesson in the limits of both good intentions and government power.

O. O. Howard and the Freedmen’s Bureau

In March 1865, Congress created the Freedmen’s Bureau to help former slaves in their transition to freedom. Run by General Oliver Otis “O. O.” Howard, the bureau lay for months at the center of a struggle between the Treasury and War departments over which would handle the freedmen after the war. Stanton’s War Department won, as it would ultimately have to enforce any edicts, and Stanton trusted Howard as an honest and effective leader.
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Although an executive branch agency, the Freedmen’s Bureau was viewed by Congress as a wedge with which it could gain control of Reconstruction.

O. O. Howard was hardly physically intimidating. Possessing a slight build, “fidgety gestures and a shrill voice,” the general was nonetheless a morally imposing figure, “proud that he was known in the nation as the ‘Christian Soldier’.”
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A devout believer who insisted that his subordinates attend prayer meetings and enforced temperance among his troops, he had long opposed slavery, though he did not have the abolitionist credentials of his brother, Rowland. O.O. had studied at West Point where, before the war, criticism of slavery was prohibited. His studies, however, marked him for success. He graduated fourth, behind Robert E. Lee’s son, Custis. After Fort Sumter, Howard served in several field commands in the East, then in occupation forces; he reveled in giving Christian inspirational talks to the freedmen’s children at the schools established in the Sea Islands.

Howard asked the central question facing the government: “What shall we do with the Negro?” He answered by emphasizing education and Christianity. The bureau would unleash “a great commission of compassionate Americans—teachers, ministers, farmers, superintendents—who would…aid and elevate the freedmen.”
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Biblical charity, however, always came with strict stipulations: “He who will not work shall not eat,” for example, and the numerous provisions in Proverbs against sloth. Howard did not see that the do-gooder instinct would unleash a monster that would spread in three separate directions. First, although the bureau definitely aided the freedmen—more than any other agency or group—it inevitably fostered dependence on government. Second, social work of this type often, if not always, tends to puff up the provider, whose role as the source of blessings inflates his own sense of worth, not to mention ego. It is not surprising, therefore, that Northerners who came South with good intentions ended up branded as “carpetbaggers,” seen only as leeches sucking off Southern vitality. Third, the bureau itself, like all government institutions, was bound to be corrupted by the flow of money and the religious zeal of the participants. When nothing short of heaven on earth is at stake, the disappearance or unauthorized use of funds and equipment cannot stand in the way of progress.

As an executive office carrying out policies philosophically more in tune with those of the congressional Radicals, the Freedmen’s Bureau was itself bound to become a source of controversy. For example, Howard supported key legislation during presidential Reconstruction that brought the forty-acres-and-a-mule dispute to a head. A March 3, 1865, act of Congress gave commissioners of the bureau authority to “select and set apart such confiscated and abandoned lands and property as may be deemed necessary for the immediate use of the Refugees.” Howard then affixed his own Circular Order No. 13 in July saying that the Amnesty Proclamation “will not be understood to extend to the surrender of abandoned or confiscated property.”
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This amounted to nothing less than Howard’s attempting to hijack Johnson’s policy to meet his own (Radical) ends, and Johnson rebuked him. Undeterred, Howard instituted quiet yet forceful opposition to Johnson’s policies, constituting an act of insubordination on behalf of blacks no different from Sherman’s defiance of Lincoln.

With the rescinding of Circular Order No. 13, any hope for a reasonably quick march toward self-sufficiency for the freedmen vanished. Most turned their expectations from land ownership to wage labor. “The Yankees preach nothing but cotton, cotton,” complained a Sea Islands freedman.
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It was equally unrealistic, however, to expect former slaves, who had worked for nothing all their lives, to suddenly display as a group the traits of capitalist entrepreneurs who had scrimped, saved, and suffered in their own way to accumulate wealth. Entrepreneurship and capital-formation skills did not come to any group instantly or easily. The bureau did what it could, attempting to police the work contracts, but often was viewed as little more than the “planter’s guards, and nothing else.”
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Nor was the bureau an early form of Great Society welfarism. Certainly it increased the size and scope of federal government operations—for example, it supervised more than three thousand schools serving 150,000 Southern students, demanding a massive amount of oversight. And without argument the bureau wasted money and in some cases encouraged indolence. Yet in the short term, the Freedmen’s Bureau was indispensable. More than 90 percent of students in Reconstruction schools were black, and they were provided with education they would never have received in elite Southern private schools. Keeping them in school, however, proved difficult. One estimate of black student attendance between 1865 and 1870 was 5 percent, and for whites it was only 20 percent of the enrollment. Reformers had an answer for that too, pushing, as they did in the North, for mandatory attendance laws, again expanding the scope of the government power.

The most enduring contribution of the Freedman’s Bureau was its commitment to African Americans’ self-sufficiency, if not equality, and Southerners knew it. “The black ball is in motion,” lamented Mary Chestnut, and once rolling, racist whites could only slow it down, not stop it.
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Some whites hoped that by teaching blacks to support themselves, white Southerners would quickly return to their “rightful” place atop the social lader. Johnson’s Amnesty Proclamation seemed to confirm black fears when former Confederates learned that when their citizenship rights were restored, their confiscated property would be returned as well. Or, in language plain to the freedmen, no plantations would be broken up for forty acres and a mule.