Penguin History of the United States of America (67 page)

The problems posed by having such a man as Johnson in the White House were better solved by going round him, as Congress did by overriding his vetoes, or as Seward did when he negotiated the purchase of the Russian colony of Alaska by the United States in 1867, and cajoled the Senate into approving the treaty; best of all, by replacing him through the normal processes, which happened when Ulysses S. Grant was elected to the Presidency on the Republican ticket in 1868. Grant, who had been so great a general, was to prove as poor a President in his way as Johnson had been in his; but at least the Congressional majority no longer had to worry about executive sabotage; it could concentrate undisturbed on the problem of the South and the blacks.

So the Republicans concentrated; and in the end they were defeated, as was inevitable. It is important to understand why, since the difficulties they struggled with were to perplex many generations of Americans after them, almost to the present day.

The blame can scarcely be laid at their door. They did the best they could in the circumstances, and if they occasionally made mistakes, lacked understanding or gave up from pure weariness, these are universal human traits, which characterize successful as well as failed undertakings. Perhaps
their programme was too backward-looking to be altogether realistic. They hoped to make over the South in the image of the ante-bellum North, with a few little improvements such as black suffrage. The South was to be industrialized, her plantation agriculture was to be transformed into a system of family farms, her towns were to grow, above all she was to develop a two-party system in which a chastened Democratic party would compete with a revived Whig party strengthened by its association with the victorious party of the North, and embodying, as the Republicans had in Lincoln’s pre-war Illinois, the aspirations of small farmers, craftsmen and businessmen. In this way the political and social legacy of the slave-holding aristocracy would be destroyed, and the federal government would be controlled, indefinitely, by the Republican party, for to its ascendancy in the North and the West would be added its strength in the South.

This vision did not take account of the speed and extent to which the North herself was changing; worse, it did not take account of the fashion and degree in which the South had changed. Perhaps it was just as well. Too much insight might have led to premature hopelessness. And Radical Reconstruction was pre-eminently one of those things which it is better to have begun and failed in than not to have attempted at all.

The central difficulty was that the South was faced with a fundamental economic problem. The disappearance of slavery had left a void in all Southern institutions, it necessitated the remodelling of society in all its aspects, but just as the peculiar institution had in origin been primarily an economic system, so, on its death, the prime task was to replace its role as the determinant of investment, of the distribution of capital and income, of consumption and of labour organization. In the long run there was very little that Northerners, either collectively or individually, could do to affect the outcome of this process: necessarily, it would be settled by the interplay of impersonal economic forces and the wishes of the Southerners, black and white.

At first the initiative lay with the blacks. The fall of the Confederacy accelerated all those tendencies which had been emerging previously: suddenly the freedmen seized control of their own destiny. They exhibited their new-found strength in ways that astonished and deeply offended their former masters. On one plantation they refused to allow the mistress into the house, instead dancing round her singing Ts free as a frog, Hallelujah!’ More significant, in the long run, was their consensus on the future. They were prepared, after the initial period of dislocation, to come home and work in the cotton-fields again; but the terms were changed. They hoped to get ownership of the land, or enough of it at least to support them in independence (the slogan of the time was ‘forty acres and a mule’, which were supposedly to be provided by the federal government); they were intensely eager to educate themselves; and they were determined to reject any form of labour organization which seemed to resurrect slavery. In particular, they wanted cash wages, freedom to come and go, an end to the
field-gang system and a limited working day. Like most socio-political programmes, this was only achieved in part; but modern economic historians have laid great emphasis on the importance of what was achieved.
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Suddenly the labour force of the South was working only nine or ten hours a day (the usual stint of labourers elsewhere in the United States) instead of from dawn to dusk, as under slavery. The labour supply, in other words, dropped by nearly a third. So, in consequence, did the production of the crops on which the prosperity of the ante-bellum South had depended – above all, cotton. Furthermore, the world price of cotton, which had touched dizzy heights during the war, rapidly returned to its previous level, and then fell below it, as other regions – India, Egypt – began to compete with the South. Even before the Civil War cotton prices had had a long-term tendency to fall: the planters had been able to maintain and increase their incomes only by growing and marketing more and more cotton, a feat which in turn had only been possible because slavery and the internal slave-trade ensured a large, docile and (above all) cheap work-force that could be rapidly deployed as new cotton lands were opened up. It was this aspect of the plantation system to which emancipation dealt the final, irreversible blow. It meant that planters faced a permanent slump in their income, in addition to the vagaries of the weather and the burden of federal taxation. Never again would cotton pay for the old magnificent way of life. Besides, the plantation system was now not only unprofitable, but in other respects pointless. The freedmen flatly refused to work in line under the threat of the driver’s whip. The air was thick with denunciation of black laziness, but the freedmen were unmoved. They were not going to work, for others, longer or harder than they saw fit. They had had enough of that in the past.

All plantation societies exhibited this phenomenon after emancipation: they all tended to lapse into subsistence economies, to produce, that is, not for the market but for the immediate needs of the workers. It happened in the British West Indies. It need not have happened in the South had the blacks been given the land and training they desired: they were capable of working extremely hard for themselves, as they had proved on the plantations in South Carolina and Mississippi that had been handed over to them during the war. Now they hoped for further distribution. Had this occurred, not only would Southern blacks have been in a position to preserve and exercise the political, social and legal rights which the North was so anxious to grant them, they might also have largely restored Southern agricultural productivity. Thaddeus Stevens was anxious to give them land. But his proposal went too far for the era. The connection between economic independence and political strength was not clearly seen (though it had been one of Thomas Jefferson’s axioms); the radicals did not want to alienate
their conservative allies, whether in the North or the South; and besides there were grave practical difficulties. Under the Southern Homestead Act of 1866, for instance, land was actually made available for distribution among the freedmen, but it was of poor quality and the offer was not taken up. To get decent land for them would have infuriated the envious poor whites as well as the rich. Besides, the legal position was far from clear. The Confiscation Acts had been wartime measures: how could legal proceedings under them be justified now that peace had been restored, when no other proceedings – no treason trials, for example – were being taken against the former rebels, when indeed the President was issuing all those pardons? Johnson had directed the return to their first owners of the Mississippi and South Carolina plantations which the freedmen had been working.
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It would have been infinitely difficult and disagreeable to take them back again, or to make seizures anywhere else; and the South was already seething over the activities of the agents of the US Treasury, who were going here and there confiscating the planters’ last marketable asset, their cotton bales, in settlement of unpaid taxes. It is not surprising that Stevens’s proposals were never taken up; but it was disastrous for the future of the blacks, all the same, and for the South as a whole. The prospects for Southern farming would have been at best precarious, whatever the system of landholding or the distribution of land between the races; but at least a more democratic arrangement, something nearer to what the Republicans envisaged, would have spread the deficits and surpluses more evenly, and by increasing the number of people with money to spend might even have stimulated some measure of that economic growth for which, as it turned out, the South had to wait until the twentieth century.

The radical programme, then, was crippled from its start; yet the Republicans seemed to hold every trump. First and foremost was the power of Congress to legislate. This power was most usefully employed when yet another amendment, the Fifteenth, was added to the Constitution: it ordained that ‘the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, colour, or previous condition of servitude’, a measure not altogether acceptable even to all Northern opinion, but the state legislatures ratified it and it became part of the Constitution in March 1870. Congress also used its power to sweep away the Johnsonian governments in the South. The Military Reconstruction Act of 2 March 1867 divided the South
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into five military districts, each to be governed by a general of the US army. These
generals had the duty of enrolling all qualified voters (in effect, all adult males, except those classes of ex-Confederates excluded by the terms of the Fourteenth Amendment), of calling together constitutional conventions which would set up new, acceptable state governments and of presiding over the first elections under these arrangements. Then, when the new governments had ratified the Fourteenth Amendment and Congress had approved the new constitutions, the reconstructed states would be at last re-admitted to the federal legislature and the military regimes could fade away. This measure went pretty far, and was effective. Opposition to it was ferocious, and discovered certain loopholes and weaknesses; but they were promptly made good by supplementary legislation. By 1870 the process was complete to the Republicans’ satisfaction, and every Southern state was once more represented in Congress.

The second great asset of the reconstructionists was the blacks. This showed itself in various ways. It quickly became clear, for example, that the new governments, which were chiefly manned by whites who had been Unionists during the war, would not be able to sustain themselves at elections without the help of black voters. So a vigorous programme of political education was undertaken, the object of which was to teach the former slaves how to vote and, especially, how to vote Republican. It would be a mistake to see this as a one-way process, a matter of ‘calling on Africa’. The eagerness of the ex-slaves to make good their freedom was immense, and they did everything they could to support the new regimes, supplying a high proportion of the political personnel. The fact that they could do so quite capably was in itself enough to refute the assertions of the white supremacists, although these, who had no intention of being refuted, preferred to emphasize the inevitable failures rather than the successes. The successes are better worth remembering today. A surprising diversity of African-American leaders emerged. One of them was an Old Etonian; another was a former slave who had learned to read by spying through the window of a white school next to his place of work. Now they provided members of the state conventions and legislatures; U S Representatives; and even two US Senators – Hiram Revels and the ex-slave Blanche K. Bruce, both from Mississippi.
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No black was elected to the Governorship of a state, but Jonathan J. Wright, originally a Pennsylvania lawyer, sat on the Supreme Court of South Carolina, and there were several Lieutenant-Governors. Through these men the African-Americans served notice on an unresponsive white America that they would no longer be passive members of the community.

However, the Republican leadership in the South during Reconstruction was never predominantly black, and would have failed immediately if
it had been. The radicals were also able to call on the energies and abilities of the two groups known respectively as scalawags – that is, Southerners who were ready to break ranks and co-operate with Reconstruction – and carpetbaggers – outsiders from the North who came to Dixie after the war. No two groups have been more maligned in American history, precisely because Reconstruction could not have gone so far as it did without them. Some among them were undoubtedly opportunist rogues of the kind who fanned out over the whole of America after the war, looking for profit and not being too scrupulous as to how they got it. Even the rogues, it might be argued, served a purpose, bringing a breath of fresh air – their brains and energy – into an area that was much in need of such refreshment; and most of the Reconstructionists were decent and valuable citizens. Some were native white Southerners who had learned the lessons of the war and were anxious to apply them: to give the South not only the industrial and financial structure she had lacked, and to make good the fearful material destruction, but also to set up a political, educational and social system like that to which, quite as much as to her wealth, the North owed her victory – to which, indeed, she largely owed her wealth. Many of the carpetbaggers were Union soldiers who had discovered the South during the war and liked the country (much as their descendants discovered California during the Second World War and went back there as soon as they could). Now they came to settle, drawn by an ancient American lure; for, partly as a result of the war, but more because of slavery, much of the South, compared to neighbouring states, was still a wilderness: in other words, a fresh frontier for pioneers to conquer. Behind these aspirant farmers, as on the westward march, came the great capitalists and industrialists, looking for ways of realizing the mineral wealth of the South – the coal of the mountains, the oil of Louisiana, the iron of Alabama.