The Sequel of Appomattox : a chronicle of the reunion of the states

With the aid of the army in the more settled regions, and by extra-legal means elsewhere, the outlaws, thieves, cotton burners, and house burners were brought somewhat under control even before the state governments were reorganized, though the embers of lawlessness continued to smolder.

The relations between the Federal soldiers stationed in the principal towns and the native white population were not, on the whole, so bad as might have been expected. If the commanding officer were well disposed, there was little danger of friction, though sometimes his troops got out of hand. The regulars had a better reputation than the volunteers. The Confederate soldiers were surfeited with fighting, but the "stay-at-home" element was often a cause of trouble. The problem of social relations between the conquerors and the conquered was troublesome. The men might get along well together, but the women would have nothing do with the "Yankees," and ill feeling arose because of their antipathy. Carl Schurz reported that "the soldier of the Union is looked upon as a stranger, an intruder, as the 'Yankee,' the 'enemy.'... The existence and intensity of this aversion is too well known to those who have served or are serving in the South to require proof."

In retaliation the soldiers developed ingenious ways of annoying the whites. Women, forced for any reason to go to headquarters, were made to take the oath of allegiance or the "ironclad" oath before their requests were granted; flags were fastened over doors, gates, or sidewalks in order to irritate the recalcitrant dames and their daughters. Confederate songs and color combinations were forbidden. In Richmond, General Halleck ordered that no marriages be performed unless the bride, the groom, and the officiating clergyman took the oath of allegiance. He explained this as a measure taken to prevent "the propagation of legitimate rebels."

The wearing of Confederate uniforms was forbidden by military order, but by May 1865, few soldiers possessed regulation uniforms. In Tennessee the State also imposed fines upon *wear wearers of the uniform. In the vicinity of military posts, buttons and marks of rank were usually ordered removed and the gray clothes dyed with some other color. General Lee, for example, had the buttons on his coat covered with cloth. But frequently the Federal commander, after issuing the orders, paid no more attention to the matter and such conflicts as arose on account of the uniform were usually caused by officious enlisted men and the Negro troops. Whitelaw Reid relates the following incident:

"Nothing was more touching, in all that I saw in Savannah, than the almost painful effort of the rebels, from generals down to privates, to conduct themselves so as to evince respect for our soldiers, and to bring no severer punishment upon the city than it had already received. There was a brutal scene at the hotel, where a drunken sergeant, with a pair of tailor's shears, insisted on cutting the buttons from the uniform of an elegant gray-headed old brigadier, who had just come in from Johnston's army; but he bore himself modestly and very handsomely through it. His staff was composed of fine-looking, stalwart fellows, evidently gentlemen, who appeared intensely mortified at such treatment. They had no clothes except their rebel uniforms, and had, as yet, had no time to procure others, but they avoided disturbances and submitted to what they might, with some propriety, and with the general approval of our officers, have resented."

The Negro troops, even at their best, were everywhere considered offensive by the native whites. General Grant, indeed, urged that only white troops be used to garrison the interior. But the Negro soldier, impudent by reason of his new freedom, his new uniform, and his new gun, was more than Southern temper could tranquilly bear, and race conflicts were frequent. A New Orleans newspaper thus states the Southern point of view: "Our citizens who had been accustomed to meet and treat the Negroes only as respectful servants, were mortified, pained, and shocked to encounter them... wearing Federal uniforms and bearing bright muskets and gleaming bayonets.... They are jostled from the sidewalks by dusky guards, marching four abreast. They were halted, in rude and sullen tones, by Negro sentinels."

The task of the Federal forces was not easy. The garrisons were not large enough nor numerous enough to keep order in the absence of civil government. The commanders in the South asked in vain for cavalry to police the rural districts. Much of the disorder, violence, and incendiarism attributed at the time to lawless soldiers appeared later to be due to discharged soldiers and others pretending to be soldiers in order to carry out schemes of robbery. The whites complained vigorously of the garrisons, and petitions were sent to Washington from mass meetings and from state legislatures asking for their removal. The higher commanders, however, bore themselves well, and in a few fortunate cases Southern whites were on most amicable terms with the garrison commanders. The correspondence of responsible military officers in the South shows how earnestly and considerately each, as a rule, tried to work out his task. The good sense of most of the Federal officers appeared when, after the murder of Lincoln, even General Grant for a brief space lost his head and ordered the arrest of paroled Confederates.

The church organizations were as much involved in the war and in the reconstruction as were secular institutions. Before the war every religious organization having members North and South, except the Catholic Church and the Jews, had separated into independent Northern and Southern bodies. In each section church feeling ran high, and when the war came, the churches supported the armies. As the Federal armies occupied Southern territory, the church buildings of each denomination were turned over to the corresponding Northern body, and Southern ministers were permitted to remain only upon agreeing to conduct "loyal services, pray for the President of the United States and for Federal victories" and to foster "loyal sentiment." The Protestant Episcopal churches in Alabama were closed from September to December 1865, and some congregations were dispersed by the soldiers because Bishop Wilmer had directed his clergy to omit the prayer for President Davis but had substituted no other. The ministers of non-liturgical churches were not so easily controlled. A Georgia Methodist preacher directed by a Federal officer to pray for the President said afterwards: "I prayed for the President that the Lord would take out of him and his allies the hearts of beasts and put into them the hearts of men or remove the cusses from office." Sometimes members of a congregation showed their resentment at the "loyal" prayers by leaving the church. But in spite of many irritations, both sides frequently managed to get some amusement out of the "loyal" services. The church situation was, however, a serious matter during and after the reconstruction, and some of its later phases will have to be discussed elsewhere.

The Unionist, or "Tory," of the lower and eastern South found himself, in 1865, a man without a country. Few in number in any community, they found themselves, upon their return from a harsh exile, the victims of ostracism or open hostility. One of them, William H. Smith, later Governor of Alabama, testified that the Southern people "manifest the most perfect contempt for a man who is known to be an unequivocal Union man; they call him a 'galvanized Yankee' and apply other terms and epithets to him." General George H. Thomas, speaking of a region more divided in sentiment than Alabama, remarked that "Middle Tennessee is disturbed by animosities and hatreds, much more than it is by the disloyalty of persons towards the Government of the United States. Those personal animosities would break out and overawe the civil authorities, but for the presence there of the troops of the United States.... They are more unfriendly to Union men, natives of the State of Tennessee, or of the South, who have been in the Union army, than they are to men of Northern birth."

In the border states, society was sharply divided, and feeling was bitter. In eastern Tennessee, eastern Kentucky, West Virginia, and parts of Arkansas and Missouri, returning Confederates met harsher treatment than did the Unionists in the lower South. Trowbridge says of east Tennessee: "Returning rebels were robbed; and if one had stolen unawares to his home, it was not safe for him to remain there. I saw in Virginia one of these exiles, who told me how homesickly he pined for the hills and meadows of east Tennessee, which he thought the most delightful region in the world. But, there was a rope hanging from a tree for him there, and he dared not go back. 'The bottom rails are on top,' said he, 'that is the trouble.' The Union element, and the worst part of the Union element, was uppermost." Confederates and Confederate sympathizers in Maryland, West Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky, were disfranchised. In West Virginia, Tennessee, and Missouri, "war trespass" suits were brought against returning Confederates for military acts done in war time. In Missouri and West Virginia, strict test oaths excluded Confederates from office, from the polls, and from the professions of teaching, preaching, and law. On the other hand in central and western Kentucky, the predominant Unionist population, themselves suffering through the abolition of slavery, and by the objectionable operations of the Freedmen's Bureau and the unwise military administration, showed more sympathy for the Confederates, welcomed them home, and soon relieved them of all restrictions.

Still another element of discord was added by the Northerners who came to exploit the South. Many mustered-out soldiers proposed to stay. Speculators of all kinds followed the withdrawing Confederate lines and with the conclusion of peace spread through the country, but they were not cordially received. With the better class, the Southerners, especially the soldiers, associated freely if seldom intimately. But the conduct of a few of their number who considered that the war had opened all doors to them, who very freely expressed their views, gave advice, condemned old customs, and were generally offensive, did much to bring all Northerners into disrepute. Tactlessly critical letters published in Northern papers did not add to their popularity. The few Northern women felt the ostracism more keenly than did the men. Benjamin C. Truman, an agent of President Johnson, thus summed up the situation: "There is a prevalent disposition not to associate too freely with Northern men or to receive them into the circles of society; but it is far from unsurmountable. Over Southern society, as over every other, woman reigns supreme, and they are more embittered against those whom they deem the authors of all their calamities than are their brothers, sons, and husbands." But, of the thousands of Northern men who overcame the reluctance of the Southerners to social intercourse, little was heard. Many a Southern planter secured a Northern partner or sold him half his plantation to get money to run the other half. For the irritations of 1865, each party must take its share of responsibility.

Had the South assisted in a skillful and adequate publicity, much disastrous misunderstanding might have been avoided. The North knew as little of the South as the South did of the North, but the North was eager for news. Able newspaper correspondents like Sidney Andrews of the Boston Advertiser and the Chicago Tribune, who opposed President Johnson's policies, Thomas W. Knox of the New York Herald, who had given General Sherman so much trouble in Tennessee, Whitelaw Reid, who wrote for several papers and tried cotton planting in Louisiana, and John T. Trowbridge, New England author and journalist, were dispatched southwards. Chief of the President's investigators was General Carl Schurz, German revolutionist, Federal soldier, and soon to be radical Republican, who held harsh views of the Southern people; and there were besides Harvey M. Watterson, Kentucky Democrat and Unionist, the father of "Marse" Henry; Benjamin C. Truman, New England journalist and soldier, whose long report was perhaps the best of all; Chief Justice Chase, who was thinking mainly of "How soon can the Negro vote?"; and General Grant, who made a report so brief that, notwithstanding its value, it attracted little attention. In addition a constant stream of information and misinformation was going northward from treasury agents, officers of the army, the Freedmen's Bureau, teachers, and missionaries. Among foreigners who described the conquered land were Robert Somers, Henry Latham, and William Hepworth Dixon. But few in the South realized the importance of supplying the North with correct information about actual conditions. The letters and reports, they thought, humiliated them; inquiry was felt to be prying and gloating. "Correspondents have added a new pang to surrender," it was said. The South was proud and refused to be catechized. From the Northern point of view, the South, a new and strange region with strange customs and principles, was of course, not to be considered as quite normal and American, but there was on the part of many correspondents a determined attempt to describe things as they were. And yet the North persisted in its unsympathetic queries when it seemed to have a sufficient answer in the reports of Grant, Schurz, and Truman.

Grant's opinion was short and direct: "I am satisfied that the mass of thinking men of the South accept the present situation of affairs in good faith.... The citizens of the Southern States are anxious to return to self-government within the Union as soon as possible." Truman came to the conclusion that "the rank and file of the disbanded Southern army... are the backbone and sinew of the South.... To the disbanded regiments of the rebel army, both officers and men, I look with great confidence as the best and altogether the most hopeful element of the South, the real basis of reconstruction and the material of worthy citizenship." General John Tarbell, before the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, testified that "there are, no doubt, disloyal and disorderly persons in the South, but it is an entire mistake to apply these terms to a whole people. I would as soon travel alone, unarmed, through the South as through the North. The South I left is not at all the South I hear and read about in the North. From the sentiment I hear in the North, I would scarcely recognize the people I saw, and, except their politics, I liked so well. I have entire faith that the better classes are friendly to the Negroes."

Carl Schurz on the other hand was not so favorably impressed. "The loyalty of the masses and most of the leaders of the southern people," he said, "consists in submission to necessity. There is, except in individual instances, an entire absence of that national spirit which forms the basis of true loyalty and patriotism." Another government official in Florida was quite doubtful of the Southern whites. "I would pin them down at the point of the bayonet," he declared, "so close that they would not have room to wiggle, and allow intelligent colored people to go up and vote in preference to them. The only Union element in the South proper... is among the colored people. The whites will treat you very kindly to your face, but they are deceitful. I have often thought, and so expressed myself, that there is so much deception among the people of the South since the rebellion, that if an earthquake should open and swallow them up, I was fearful that the devil would be dethroned and some of them take his place."

The point of view of the Confederate military leaders was exhibited by General Wade Hampton in a letter to President Johnson and by General Lee in his advice to Governor Letcher of Virginia. General Hampton wrote: "The South unequivocally 'accepts the situation' in which she is placed. Everything that she has done has been done in perfect faith, and in the true and highest sense of the word, she is loyal. By this I mean that she intends to abide by the laws of the land honestly, to fulfill all her obligations faithfully and to keep her word sacredly, and I assert that the North has no right to demand more of her. You have no right to ask, or expect that she will at once profess unbounded love to that Union from which for four years she tried to escape at the cost of her best blood and all her treasures." General Lee in order to set an example applied through General Grant for a pardon under the amnesty proclamation and soon afterwards he wrote to Governor Letcher: "All should unite in honest efforts to obliterate the effects of war, and to restore the blessings of peace. They should remain, if possible, in the country; promote harmony and good-feeling; qualify themselves to vote; and elect to the State and general legislatures wise and patriotic men, who will devote their abilities to the interests of the country and the healing of all dissensions; I have invariably recommended this course since the cessation of hostilities, and have endeavored to practice it myself."

Southerners of the Confederacy everywhere, then, accepted the destruction of slavery and the renunciation of state sovereignty; they welcomed an early restoration of the Union, without any punishment of leaders of the defeated cause. But they were proud of their Confederate records though now legally "loyal" to the United States; they considered the Negro as free but inferior, and expected to be permitted to fix his status in the social organization and to solve the problem of free labor in their own way. To embarrass the easy and permanent realization of these views there was a society disrupted, economically prostrate, deprived of its natural leaders, subjected to a control not always wisely conceived nor effectively exercised, and, finally, containing within its own population unassimilated elements which presented problems fraught with difficulty and danger.

CHAPTER II. WHEN FREEDOM CRIED OUT

The Negro is the central figure in the reconstruction of the South. Without the Negro there would have been no Civil War. Granting a war fought for any other cause, the task of reconstruction would, without him, have been comparatively simple. With him, however, reconstruction meant more than the restoring of shattered resources; it meant the more or less successful attempt to obtain and secure for the freedman civil and political rights, and to improve his economic and social status. In 1861, the American Negro was everywhere an inferior, and most of his race were slaves; in 1865, he was no longer a slave, but whether he was to be serf, ward, or citizen was an unsettled problem; in 1868, he was in the South the legal and political equal, frequently the superior, of the white; and before the end of the reconstruction period he was made by the legislation of some states and by Congress the legal equal of the white even in certain social matters.

The race problem which confronted the American people had no parallel in the past. British and Spanish-American emancipation of slaves had affected only small numbers or small regions, in which one race greatly outnumbered the other. The results of these earlier emancipations of the Negroes and the difficulties of European states in dealing with subject white populations were not such as to afford helpful example to American statesmen. But since it was the actual situation in the Southern States rather than the experience of other countries which shaped the policies adopted during reconstruction, it is important to examine with some care the conditions in which the Negroes in the South found themselves at the close of the war.

The Negroes were not all helpless and without experience "when freedom cried out."* In the Border States and in the North there were, in 1861, half a million free Negroes accustomed to looking out for themselves. Nearly 200,000 Negro men were enlisted in the United States army between 1862 and 1865, and many thousands of slaves had followed raiding Federal forces to freedom or had escaped through the Confederate lines. State emancipation in Missouri, Maryland, West Virginia, and Tennessee, and the practical application of the Emancipation Proclamation where the Union armies were in control ended slavery for many thousands more. Wherever the armies marched, slavery ended. This was true even in Kentucky, where the institution was not legally abolished until the adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment. Altogether more than a million Negroes were free and to some extent habituated to freedom before May 1865.

Most of these war-emancipated Negroes were scattered along the borders of the Confederacy, in camps, in colonies, in the towns, on refugee farms, at work with the armies, or serving as soldiers in the ranks. There were large working colonies along the Atlantic coast from Maryland to Florida. The chief centers were near Norfolk, where General Butler was the first to establish a "contraband" camp, in North Carolina, and on the Sea Islands of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, which had been seized by the Federal fleet early in the war. To the Sea Islands also were sent, in 1865, the hordes of Negroes who had followed General Sherman out of Georgia and South Carolina. Through the border states from the Atlantic to the Mississippi and along both sides of the Mississippi from Cairo, Illinois, to New Orleans, there were other refugee camps, farms, and colonies. For periods varying from one to four years these free Negroes had been at work, often amid conditions highly unfavorable to health, under the supervision of officers of the Treasury Department or of the army.

Emancipation was therefore a gradual process, and most of the Negroes, through their widening experience on the plantations, with the armies, and in the colonies, were better fitted for freedom in 1865 than they had been in 1861. Even their years of bondage had done something for them, for they knew how to work and they had adopted in part the language, habits, religion, and morals of the whites. But slavery had not made them thrifty, self-reliant, or educated. Frederick Douglass said of the Negro at the end of his servitude: "He had none of the conditions of self-preservation or self-protection. He was free from the individual master, but he had nothing but the dusty road under his feet. He was free from the old quarter that once gave him shelter, but a slave to the rains of summer and to the frosts of winter. He was turned loose, naked, hungry, and destitute to the open sky." To prove that he was free the Negro thought he must leave his old master, change his name, quit work for a time, perhaps get a new wife, and hang around the Federal soldiers in camp or garrison, or go to the towns where the Freedmen's Bureau was in process of organization. To the Negroes who remained at home—and, curiously enough, for a time at least many did so—the news of freedom was made known somewhat ceremonially by the master or his representative. The Negroes were summoned to the "big house," told that they were free, and advised to stay on for a share of the crop. The description by Mrs. Clayton, the wife of a Southern general, will serve for many: "My husband said, 'I think it best for me to inform our Negroes of their freedom.' So he ordered all the grown slaves to come to him, and told them they no longer belonged to him as property, but were all free. 'You are not bound to remain with me any longer, and I have a proposition to make to you. If any of you desire to leave, I propose to furnish you with a conveyance to move you, and with provisions for the balance of the year.' The universal answer was, 'Master, we want to stay right here with you.' In many instances the slaves were so infatuated with the idea of being, as they said, 'free as birds' that they left their homes and consequently suffered; but our slaves were not so foolish."*

The Negroes, however, had learned of their freedom before their old masters returned from the war; they were aware that the issues of the war involved in some way the question of their freedom or servitude, and through the "grapevine telegraph," the news brought by the invading soldiers, and the talk among the whites, they had long been kept fairly well informed. What the idea of freedom meant to the Negroes it is difficult to say. Some thought that there would be no more work and that all would be cared for by the Government; others believed that education and opportunity were about to make them the equal of their masters. The majority of them were too bewildered to appreciate anything except the fact that they were free from enforced labor.

Conditions were most disturbed in the so-called "Black Belt," consisting of about two hundred counties in the most fertile parts of the South, where the plantation system was best developed and where by far the majority of the Negroes were segregated. The Negroes in the four hundred more remote and less fertile "white" counties, which had been less disturbed by armies, were not so upset by freedom as those of the Black Belt, for the garrisons and the larger towns, both centers of demoralization, were in or near the Black Belt. But there was a moving to and fro on the part of those who had escaped from the South or had been captured during the war or carried into the interior of the South to prevent capture. To those who left slavery and home to find freedom were added those who had found freedom and were now trying to get back home or to get away from the Negro camps and colonies which were breaking up. A stream of immigration which began to flow to the southwest affected Negroes as far as the Atlantic coast. In the confusion of moving, families were broken up, and children, wife, or husband were often lost to one another. The very old people and the young children were often left behind for the former master to care for. Regiments of Negro soldiers were mustered out in every large town and their numbers were added to the disorderly mass. Some of the Federal garrisons and Bureau stations were almost overwhelmed by the numbers of blacks who settled down upon them waiting for freedom to bestow its full measure of blessing, and many of the Negroes continued to remain in a demoralized condition until the new year.

The first year of freedom was indeed a year of disease, suffering, and death. Several partial censuses indicate that in 1865-66 the Negro population lost as many by disease as the whites had lost in war. Ill-fed, crowded in cabins near the garrisons or entirely without shelter, and unaccustomed to caring for their own health, the blacks who were searching for freedom fell an easy prey to ordinary diseases and to epidemics. Poor health conditions prevailed for several years longer. In 1870, Robert Somers remarked that "the health of the whites has greatly improved since the war, while the health of the Negroes has declined till the mortality of the colored population, greater than the mortality of the whites was before the war, has now become so markedly greater, that nearly two colored die for every white person out of equal numbers of each."

Morals and manners also suffered under the new dispensation. In the crowded and disease-stricken towns and camps, the conditions under which the roving Negroes lived were no better for morals than for health, for here there were none of the restraints to which the blacks had been accustomed and which they now despised as being a part of their servitude. But in spite of all the relief that could be given there was much want. In fact, to restore former conditions the relief agencies frequently cut off supplies in order to force the Negroes back to work and to prevent others from leaving the country for the towns. But the hungry freedmen turned to the nearest food supply, and "spilin de gypshuns" (despoiling the Egyptians, as the Negroes called stealing from the whites) became an approved means of support. Thefts of hogs, cattle, poultry, field crops, and vegetables drove almost to desperation those whites who lived in the vicinity of the Negro camps. When the ex-slave felt obliged to go to town, he was likely to take with him a team and wagon and his master's clothes if he could get them.

The former good manners of the Negro were now replaced by impudence and distrust. There were advisers among the Negro troops and other agitators who assured them that politeness to whites was a mark of servitude. Pushing and crowding in public places, on street cars and on the sidewalks, and impudent speeches everywhere marked generally the limit of rudeness. And the Negroes were, in this respect, perhaps no worse than those European immigrants who act upon the principle that bad manners are a proof of independence.

The year following emancipation was one of religious excitement for large numbers of the blacks. Before 1865, the Negro church members were attached to white congregations or were organized into missions, with nearly always a white minister in charge and a black assistant. With the coming of freedom the races very soon separated in religious matters. For this there were two principal reasons: the Negro preachers could exercise more influence in independent churches; and new church organizations from the North were seeking Negro membership. Sometimes Negro members were urged to insist on the right "to sit together" with the whites. In a Richmond church a Negro from the street pushed his way to the communion altar and knelt. There was a noticeable pause; then General Robert E. Lee went forward and knelt beside the Negro; and the congregation followed his example. But this was a solitary instance. When the race issue was raised by either color, the church membership usually divided. There was much churchgoing by the Negroes, day and night, and church festivities and baptisms were common. The blacks preferred immersion and, wanted a new baptism each time they changed to a new church. Baptizings in ponds, creeks, or rivers were great occasions and were largely attended. "Shouting" the candidates went into the water and "shouting" they came out. One old woman came up screaming, "Freed from slavery! freed from sin! Bless God and General Grant!"