Civil War and Reconstruction: Lecture 20 TranscriptApril 3, 2008<< back

Professor David Blight: We're going to elect, that is re-elect, Lincoln in a moment, the election of 1864 being one of the, without a question, crucial turning points in the war, in a war that was so political. But spare the poets. I want to begin by placing you somewhere. The ending of the Civil War, of course, was for thousands upon thousands, really millions of Americans, a confrontation with death on a scale they'd never known, never experienced, and frankly never have again. There's a marvelous new book on this, two new books on this, one in particular by Drew Faust, whom you've read already, a book called The Republic of Suffering, which I recommend to you--it just came out a couple of months ago--which is all about the death culture that the Civil War bred.

Our greatest death poet was Whitman. This is risky. I'm going to actually recite a little piece, little bits, of what could be Whitman's greatest poem, at least it in my view. But what do I know? I'm not a literary scholar. But there are ways in Whitman's "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" that he is actually anticipating what's going to happen, with time, to the problem of how Americans will remember this ghastly bloodletting they've just experienced. It's, of course, the poem about Lincoln's death. Whitman really had a thing about Lincoln, as you may know. He wrote possibly the only poem that ever rhymed in his magnificent collection, "O Captain! My Captain," in relation to Lincoln's death. But "Lilacs" is a masterpiece. It's the poem he wrote to try to imagine the funeral train of Abraham Lincoln, the train that took some twenty days; three coffins, because two got damaged. It stopped in, I forget now, sixteen, seventeen different cities on this incredible tour all over New England and then all across the North and the Midwest and finally to his burial in Springfield, Illinois. And what Whitman really wrote here was a kind of a calming--it's written in a mood of a kind a calming, depoliticized, contemplation on what Whitman called "the fathomless, sure-enwinding arms of cool-enfolding death." But it's very much directly about Lincoln's death.

And Whitman imagines a songbird; calls it a warbling. And he says he hears this warbling singing a solitary song, his words, "of the bleeding throat, Death's outlet song of life, (for well dear brother)"--he's speaking to the bird now--"(for well dear brother I know, If thou wast not granted to sing thou wouldst surely die.)" And he's trying to use the bird--go read this poem, read it three, four, and five times--he's trying to use the warbling, the song sparrow, as a metaphor for all of America. "How shall I warble?" Here he gives voice to the bird. He even writes lyrics for the bird. "How shall I warble myself for the dead one that I loved?" It's like an offering. Whitman

picks a sprig of lilac, he says, and places Abraham Lincoln's funeral train in the setting of what he calls "ever returning spring across the vast landscape of America, from east to the prairie." It was April, like now, a little later; lilacs were in bloom by late in the month. And then comes this magnificent verse. "Over the breast of spring, the land, amidst cities, Amid lanes and through old woods, where lately the violets peep'd from the ground, spotting the grey debris, Amid the grass in the fields each side of the lanes, passing the endless grass, Passing the yellow-spear'd wheat, every grain from its shroud in the dark brown fields uprisen, Passing the apple-tree blows of white and pink in the orchards, Carrying a corpse to where it shall rest in the grave, Night and day journeys a coffin." And then he says the bird must sing its "carol of death." And the poet tries to give words to the music, yet one senses that even Whitman, with all his powers, could not match the little warbling's power, to deliver what he calls "that powerful psalm in the night." This is a poem of grief for the whole country. He's trying to capture the meaning of death, all that death, caused in the Civil War, if it's possible. But he gives the job to a tiny little bird. Whitman himself, he says, is left with "visions," his words, "of battle-corpses" and "the debris of all the slain soldiers of the war," in his head. The funeral train passes by all the images the poet can muster and then he's just left to say, his words: "The living remained and suffered."

Now I'll return to Whitman. It's one way to get a handle, if it is a handle, on what Americans were coping with in 1865, the level and scale of sacrifice that they had experienced. And of course Lincoln's assassination came two, three days after Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox. More on that in a minute. But back up with me, back up with me into that last year of the war. It was still possible for the South to win its version of a victory as late as I'd say August of 1864; I suppose you could even say September, but after the fall of Atlanta it wasn't likely. But now quickly, that election of '64 was one of the most important in our history. We don't pay a lot of attention to it because we kind of speed by it or around it and we almost ignore it sometimes--oh it's another election, let's get on with the Civil War.

Across the North there was tremendous war weariness that summer. I mentioned already, 65 -- 66,0000 casualties in Grant's Army alone in Virginia in two and a half months. There was great bitterness against the draft that summer. Now, in the end only about six, seven percent of all Union soldiers will actually be draftees, but there was tremendous resentment against it. In the North there were the Peace Democrats; or sometimes that's what they were called. Sometimes they were called Copperheads, named for the snake. Copperheads usually though were those people who somehow were deemed truly disloyal to the Union and actually were engaging in machinations and conspiracies to overthrow the Union. That's always been an open question. There was an effort within the Republican Party as early as May and June of '64 to dump

Lincoln in place of either Salmon Chase, a member of Lincoln's cabinet, his Attorney General--and read Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals if you want to know just how much Chase was scheming to dump Lincoln, as his own Attorney General. Chase may have had the most beautiful daughter in Washington, Kate Chase, but he had no style. And then there was an effort to dump Lincoln in favor of the candidate John C. Fremont, the same Fremont who had run in 1856 as the Republican presidential candidate. And Lincoln was himself all but convinced, by July and early August of '64, that he probably wouldn't win re-election; what to do in the meantime?

The Democratic Party nominated George B. McClellan, the former general, commanding General of the Army of the Potomac. That Democratic Party in the midst of the Civil War was a confusing lot, and one might even say a confused lot. Some of them truly wanted to sue for a negotiated peace, but they would always say they wanted a negotiated peace of the South that would still restore the Union. And, of course, that was never acceptable to Jefferson Davis and the Confederate government. Many of them were quite explicitly for a negotiated peace that would not result in emancipation. They wanted to turn emancipation around. They wanted a Union without emancipation; that is exactly what McClellan wanted. There was a deeply white supremacist strain in much of the northern Democratic Party and they put up a formidable challenge to wartime president, in the midst of Civil War. They painted Lincoln and the Republicans as what they constantly called miscegenationist; they used the term all the time. The Republicans were going to make whites and blacks marry each other. They called Abraham Lincoln, in this campaign, "Abe the widow maker." They were already waving the bloody shirt that would become so ubiquitous in the wake of the war, blaming Lincoln for all the death. They also referred to him as "Abe the nigger lover." And the Democratic papers produced cartoons, famous cartoons--I wish I had an example of one today--of what they called miscegenation balls; these were dances and balls where whites and blacks all came together, kissed, made love and mixed the races.

What Lincoln desperately needed was battlefield success to alter Northern war morale; and of course they got that. They got it with the fall of Mobile Harbor in the first and second week of August--Admiral David Farragut, in the largest naval engagement of the war, took Mobile, the last major southern seaport, to come into Union hands--and then especially with the fall of Atlanta, on the 3rd of September '64. And then in the month of September further victories by Philip Sheridan's cavalry in the Shenandoah Valley, driving Confederate armies basically out of the Shenandoah Valley, made it now possible to say that the war was on a course of Union victory, that the Confederacy was in a state of near collapse. And when the election came the votes were there. Lincoln won fifty-five percent of the total popular vote. Forty-five percent of the electorate in the northern states did not vote for Lincoln and in effect,

therefore, were not voting for emancipation. Keep that in mind when we start discussing Reconstruction. Eighteen of the Free states made it possible for soldiers to vote at the front; only two did not, and even those let soldiers vote by absentee. It is the first time in world history, so far as we know, that a republic in the midst--there weren't that many republics to speak of, of course--but the first time in the course of a civil war that a republic held a general election and pulled it off. Most importantly, Lincoln won an extraordinary seventy-eight percent of the soldier vote, of all those hundreds of thousands in the Army and Navy, and they voted in droves. It was, that election, a referendum on the war, and it was a referendum on its purpose, and it was a referendum, therefore, on emancipation.

One of the most extraordinary events that happened in that election season was in the third week of August of '64, Lincoln invited--this time invited--Frederick Douglass to come to the White House. They had met the year before in August, in '63, but that was at Douglass's own prodding. In '63 Douglass had gone to the White House to complain about unequal pay and brutal discriminations against black troops in the Union armies, and he got an audience, at least for awhile, with Lincoln--the first time they met, the beginnings of a remarkable relationship. But in '64 Lincoln invites Douglass--and Douglass didn't know what he was going to be asked to do. And they sat down for about forty-five minutes, eye to eye, and Abraham Lincoln asked Frederick Douglass to lead a campaign to funnel as many slaves out of the upper south into some kind of security in the North, before election day in November, because he feared he would not be re-elected and he wanted as many slaves as possible to be secure within Union lines and somehow legally free under the proclamation, before McClellan won the election. Now frankly, Douglass was stunned. Here was Abe Lincoln asking him to be John Brown, sort of. He could hardly believe it, and he left there with a whole new kind of conception of Lincoln, frankly--not entirely new, he was already working on that. But he went back home to Rochester, New York and he organized about fifteen or sixteen agents, by letter and telegram, in late August and the first week of September, all over the North. He didn't have a clue how he was really going to do this, or how much the army was really going to help him, but he started calling all his old friends in the abolition movement, and a lot of the people who'd been recruiting black troops, and said, "Help me, we're gonna funnel slaves out of the South. I don't know how but help me." And then came the fall of Atlanta, a couple of Sheridan's victories in the Shenandoah, and the whole scheme was called off. But it's a measure of Lincoln's own sense of reality, that he was about to lose.

All right, the war ended, of course, in great part with the surrender at Appomattox, and then with the surrender of Joseph Johnston to Sherman in a farmhouse in central North Carolina, about ten days later--what is it, April 21, I believe? Let me discuss

that briefly. It's an extremely important moment and event, and the terms of that surrender are extremely important for what's to come. In a war that had become so political, so much about morale, so much about public opinion, so much about the will of two peoples to see it through. The surrender terms were actually almost utterly apolitical. I had a couple of photos up here. I don't know if you can see this very well. This is one of many photographs that Mathew Brady and his troop of photographers took of Richmond, after it fell April 5, 1865, as so many journalists now started saying the United States was finally an old country because it had ruins. Isn't that great? You need some ruins to have a history.

Well, Richmond fell 5th of April of '65, and Lee's army did escape. He was experiencing tremendous desertion. He escaped westward. The goal he had, so far as we know, was to reach the Blue Ridge Mountains and maybe even get south into North Carolina, maybe hook up with Johnston's army that was retreating in front of Sherman up into North Carolina, maybe somehow connect the two remaining Confederate armies, and carry on the war, if they could. Lee really didn't ever, ever want to give up. But he had to. He was cut off. There was an emerging lethal mixture now, of no supplies, desertion, and the almost unfathomable oversupply of the Union forces. He was grossly outnumbered and finally he had to send a note, after this last little battle they actually fought, on the 11th of April, where eighteen men were killed. And there's a little cemetery at Appomattox today where you can see the gravestones of those eighteen men. It's one of the most moving little cemeteries I've ever seen. They're the last to die in a totally futile battle.

The terms of the surrender were essentially this--and, by the way, they were Lincoln's direct orders. That's a parole slip. It's a photocopy of exactly what they looked like. The Union Army took printing presses out to Appomattox Courthouse, which was this little town, and they set it up in a tavern and they pumped out these parole slips, about 25 to 30,000 of them in forty-eight hours. The Confederate soldiers were given these paroles. They were allowed to keep their side arms, they had to surrender their rifles, they were allowed to keep horses if they had them, and in essence they were simply told go home. Nobody, except technically Lee himself, was taken into custody. But Lee's custody was simply the right to ride his horse back to Richmond, if he chose, or wherever he wanted to go, and he was technically put under house arrest--not allowed to leave his house for some period of time--but never charged with anything. Jefferson Davis will--more on that later. Alexander H. Stephens, the vice-president, will technically be charged, although never tried. Davis will be charged but never tried. No one, except the commandant of Andersonville Prison, one Captain Wirz, a Swiss born immigrant who commanded Andersonville, the worst of the South's prisons, he was the only person accused of treason and war crimes and executed as a result of this war.

Now Lee and Grant, of course, met--and Ken Burns milks this for all it's worth, so I'm going to let you feel it from him--they met at the McLean House at Appomattox. Go there someday. It still looks almost exactly as it looked in 1865. Grant and Lee barely remembered one another. They knew each other now--and altogether extraordinarily well--from fighting each other for so long. They sat down in the parlor of this house and Grant gave Lee the terms. Lee dressed up in his finest golden sash. He wore a sword. He fully expected this to be a traditional eighteenth or nineteenth century surrender. He was going to give his sword and all that nonsense, but Grant just said, "I don't want your sword, go home." Now it's also true that when they finally cut Lee's army off, and Lee had to send that note and say, "Please meet me to consider surrender terms," the news just zoomed around the Union army and Union soldiers just stated going crazy, celebrating, screaming, shooting off guns, riding on their horses all over the place, "The war's over, the war's over, the war's over, God damn rebels have surrendered." And Grant put out an order all through his army that there would be no celebrations. It was Grant already understanding that the surrender had to be political too, and that there would be tremendous untold bitterness to deal with in the wake of this war. Grant, as a general, had no idea what politically would come. He wasn't involved yet in reconstruction plans at all. But it also was a kind of statement, of course, of honor among soldiers.

To the South, you can rest assured, the day they heard about Appomattox was the way it was for most Northerners about the day they heard of Lincoln's assassination. It is all over diaries, all over literature. It sometimes is just called "the surrender," "the day we heard." There's so many statements of it, throughout Southern letters and diaries, as I've said. I'll just read a couple, just briefly, and then one from a Northerner, to show you what this moment means on both sides and how difficult reconstruction is going to be-- just look at their diaries. Remember Kate Stone? I read from her diary before, a Louisiana planter woman who fled over to Texas and lost most of her slaves. She writes into her diary. "April 28, '65: All are fearfully depressed," she reports. "I cannot bear to hear them talk of defeat." She still hoped that Confederate armies might rally and fight, as she puts it, "to be free or die." Easy for her to say. On May 15 she opened a journal entry with this definition, that I may have read before, where the first words are "conquered, submission, subjugation," she says, "are the words in my heart." And then when she hears that John Wilkes Booth has shot Lincoln, she rejoiced in Lincoln's death and honored, at least in her diary, John Wilkes Booth for, quote, "ridding the world of a tyrant. We are glad he is not alive to rejoice in our humiliation and insult us with his jokes." There are thousands of those expressions in Southern letters and diaries.

That spring and summer an estimated 8 to 10,000 ex-Confederates, many of them former officers, would flee the country. They ended up going to Brazil, England, other

parts of Europe, Mexico, Canada, and a few even went as far away as Japan, for fear--I mean, Jubal Early, that conniving old rat--more on him later--he ran to Mexico. He was certain they were all going to be executed, at least the officer corps of Lee's army--none of them were. And let me read you a diary entry from a Northern woman, a great diarist. Her diary's hardly known, but man, her diary is almost equal to Mary Chestnut. I first encountered it in a manuscript at the American Antiquarian Society in Worchester. Her name was Caroline Barrett White. She kept a diary for years, decades, and her war-years diary is extraordinary. This is her April 10, 1865 entry. "Hurrah, hurrah, sound the loud timbale over Egypt's dark sea. Early this morning our ears were greeted with the sound of bells ringing a joyous peal. General Lee had surrendered with his whole army to General Grant!" She's got exclamation marks all over the place. "Surely this is the Lord's doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes." And she goes on and on and on, all kinds of biblical cadences to talk about the sense of jubilation she sees in the streets of her Massachusetts town. And then five days later, April 15, comes this entry, and it's the longest entry in her diary, several pages, and all around the outside of the pages she blackened the edges. She writes, "The darkest day I ever remember. This morning the sun rose upon a nation jubilant with victory, but it sets upon one plunged into deepest sorrow." Her longest of all diary entries she talked about the shocking intelligence of Lincoln's murder, and then says, "Where will treason ever end? The rapidity with which events crowd upon one another now is perfectly bewildering." Indeed it was.

Now, as was so often the case in this war though, Abraham Lincoln left one of the best descriptions of what the war had been about. In the greatest speech ever delivered by an American president--I would venture that; we could get up a debate on that I'm sure. But what are you going to put up against the Second Inaugural for an economy of language and a music of words and an honesty of meaning? Read the Second Inaugural; it only takes about three minutes. He's been re-elected. This is March '65. The war is almost over; not there yet. What does he say in that speech? What had it been about? How does he explain all the death? He doesn't find that easy. But in the second paragraph, and the third paragraph, came a few phrases that we've been trying to answer through interpretation in our 65 to 70,000 books on the Civil War, more than one a day that we've written ever since. He's thinking back to his First Inaugural and he says, "Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish." That's his interpretation; of course, he's going to get vast disagreement on that from Southerners. And then the famous phrase, "And the war came."

There are more titles of books on the Civil War taken from this speech than anything else ever done. When in doubt, people just go to Lincoln's Second Inaugural and find some little phrase, if they can find three words somebody else hasn't used before, and

it becomes the title of their book. Kenneth Stamp used And the War Came, a book on secession. Jim McPherson has a new book of essays out, it's called Mighty Scourge of War; it comes out of here. Stephen Oates' biography of Abraham Lincoln, Malice Toward None. I mean, it's just endless. But then in that next paragraph, "One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves." Three weeks ago when Barack Obama used the word "slave," "slavery," or "slaves," seven times in that remarkable speech, it's remarkable because it's been altogether rare that presidents or presidential candidates have ever mouthed the word "slave" in American political rhetoric. But Lincoln did. "One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part." No kidding. And here it is. "These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest." Whoa. "All knew," says Lincoln, "that this interest was somehow the cause of the war." Somehow; that's the greatest somehow in American letters. We've been trying to explain the somehow ever since, and we never can quite pin it down. And before that paragraph's over you'd been treated to some of the most beautiful rhetoric ever written, at least by an American president. He says that everybody wished for a result less fundamental and astounding. We don't want all this revolution, but that's what we got. And then comes that line, "for every drop of blood shed by the lash, it shall be paid by the sword." You can't hear it or read it and not know what the war had been about.

Now, we're going to deal in the next several lectures about the extended question of results of this war, the consequences, short and long-term. And there are many things we can put on that list, to say the least. And let me just give you a short list to begin with, and we're going to come back to so much of this. A quick list. Just keep it handy. And some of them are actually signaled in that Second Inaugural. I mean, one is that secession was killed, almost forever. Now and then you hear about the Upper Peninsula of Michigan wanting to secede or something; Texas once in awhile gets back on its heels and says "don't mess with Texas" and says they're going to secede, and some parts of the country say "go ahead."

There's a fundamental change in the nature of American nationalism and the centralization of government that will come out of this war. Eleven of the first twelve amendments to the U.S. Constitution had been written to limit national power. This is just fundamental. It's one of Lincoln's less fundamental and astounding results. Six of the next seven constitutional amendments will be directly to increase federal power; more on that as we do Reconstruction. Power itself will shift from south to north, at least for awhile, in American political culture. Nativism will be put on the run, at least for awhile, quite awhile. The old Nativist Party and all that nativism of antebellum America, what are you going to do with all that xenophobic nativism in the wake of a war where one of every four Union soldiers was foreign born? And now they're U.S. citizens claiming pensions on the U.S. Government for saving the Union; thank you

very much. What Nativist party is going to get any traction with Union veterans in the 1870s? None. The Labor Movement and the Women's Rights Movements, on the other hand, are going to be crippled--not ruined, but crippled--by the Civil War, by the authoritarianism of war, all its centralization. And emancipation, of course, ushered into national life all sorts of new challenges, new ideas, new meanings, and this most difficult American idea of all, racial equality. God, what are you going to do with that now? It's been taken out of its--it's been unshucked from its shell, by war. Oh, there'll be a thousand meanings, and we'll come back to six or seven of them.

Now, I want to introduce Reconstruction plans here in just one moment, but at this particular moment in time, of all the possible meanings people had taken from this war--and of course they're very different meanings if you're one of those white Georgians who had to face Sherman's Army, of if you're Kate Stone out in Texas, or if you're a widow of your husband and four of your sons who've died in the war. I mean, there are many, many, many different individual stories. But think back to what Lincoln had just said in the Second Inaugural about what the war had been about, and this chastening that it had brought the country. One of the most remarkable documents left from this massive documentation of this war, and of emancipation, is this letter. Perhaps you've seen it before, it's getting reprinted now and then. It's a letter written by a former slave whose name was Jordan Anderson. How many of you've read Jordan Anderson's letter before? Good, the grad students have, better have, yes.

Well, this is in the summer of '65. What had the war meant? Jordan Anderson had been a slave in Tennessee. He's living in Ohio now. The war's over. He gets a letter from his old master, whose name was Colonel P.H. Anderson. And Jordan's living in Dayton, Ohio. And he writes back, to Colonel Anderson. He says, "Thank you very much for your letter." Anderson wants him to come back. "Dear Sir, I got your letter, and was glad to find you had not forgotten old Jordan, and that you wanted me to come back and live with you again, promising to do better for me than anybody else can. I have often felt uneasy about you. I thought the Yankees would've hung you long before this for harboring Rebs they found at your house. I suppose they never heard about you going to Colonel Martin's to kill the Union soldier that was left by his company in their stable. Although you shot at me twice before I left you, I did not want to hear of your being hurt, and am glad you are still living. It would do me good to go back to the dear old home again, see Miss Mary and Miss Martha and Allan and Esther and Green and Lee. Give my love to them all, and tell them I hope we will meet in a better world, if not in this. I would've gone back to see you all when I was working in the Nashville Hospital, but one of the neighbors told me Henry intended to shoot me, if he ever got a chance.

I want to know particularly what the good chance is you proposed to give me. I'm doing tolerably well here. I get $25.00 a month with victuals and clothing, have a comfortable home for Mandy"--that's his wife. "The folks here call her Mrs. Anderson, and the children, Millie Jane and Grundy, go to school and are learning. The teacher says Grundy has a head to be a preacher. They go to Sunday school, and Mandy and me attend church regularly. We are kindly treated. Sometimes we overhear others saying, 'Them colored people were slaves down in Tennessee.' The children feel hurt when they hear such remarks, but I will tell them it was no disgrace in Tennessee to belong to Colonel Anderson. Many darkies would have been proud, as I used to was, to call you 'Master.' Now, if you will write and say what wages you will give me, I will be better able to decide whether it would be to my advantage to move back again. As to my freedom, which you say I can have, there's nothing to be gained on that score as I got my Free Papers in 1864 from the Provost Marshal General of the Department of Nashville. Mandy says she would be afraid to go back without some proof that you are sincerely disposed to treat us justly, and we have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you. This will make us forget, and forgive old scores, and rely on your justice, and friendship, in the future. I served you faithfully for thirty-two years, and Mandy twenty years. At $25.00 a month for me, and $2.00 a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to $11,680.00. Add to this the interest for the time our wages has been kept back, and deduct what you paid for our clothing and three doctors' visits for me and pulling a tooth for Mandy, and the balance will show what we are in justice entitled to. Please send the money, by Adam's Express, care of V. Winters Esquire, Dayton, Ohio." He goes on another paragraph, and then there's a P.S. "Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me."

What did freedom mean? What had the war meant? Wages, with interest, according to Jordan Anderson. Well, we'll see whether the United States would help out old Jordan. All right, now Reconstruction is, of course, that ten or eleven year period of American history that sometimes, too often--I don't know how it was taught to you-- but sometimes, too often we skirt through. It's complicated, not as much glory to go around as there is during the war. It's fraught with some skullduggery and corruption on an unprecedented scale, on all kinds of sides. It's a time of enormous imagination and experimentation, in politics and law. It's also the time in American history when we have by far our largest level of domestic terrorism and violence--a good deal more on that in the weeks to come. But Reconstruction policy, of course, began during the war. The debates over Reconstruction policy began during the war. [Professor looks for materials] Well sorry, I had Herman Melville's poem here but what did I do with Herman Melville? Forgive me. "Check that," as the old sports announcer used to say.

The policies on Reconstruction took two paths, and those paths begin as early as late 1863, and they are especially being debated in the federal government in 1864, and they are ripe by the end of the war in 1865. Lincoln's basic approach to Reconstruction, when and if they could end the war, win the war and stop it, was to make Reconstruction as fast as possible, as lenient as possible--remember these three things, you're going to hear it again--as fast as possible, as lenient as possible, and as much as possible under presidential authority, not Congress. He's going to fashion this so-called Ten Percent Plan, which I'll explain next time, but it in essence meant that he wanted ten percent of the white voting population of a former Confederate state to take a loyalty oath to the Union, to redraw a new constitution, denounce secession, accept emancipation, and they would be readmitted to the Union under presidential authority. And he wanted to do as much of it as possible during the war because when the war ends he could lose his presidential war powers.

In Congress, in his own party, led by Thaddeus Stevens in the House and Charles Sumner in the Senate--and you'll learn a good deal more about that in the two weeks to come--there's a very different approach to Reconstruction. The Congressional Radicals, as they become known, Republicans all, want a Reconstruction that is longer, harsher, and under Congressional control. Now Lincoln won't be around, of course, to engage in this battle after the war is over, but he was there during the war, and they had quite a tussle over imagining how Reconstruction would happen. Now if you want to get a sense of Lincoln's approach to Reconstruction, now you can read the last paragraph of the Second Inaugural about malice toward none and charity for all and binding up the nation's wound, and so forth. But there's also the statement he made in his last cabinet meeting, the last meeting he had of his cabinet, before he went to Ford's Theater, literally that night. He said to his cabinet, and I'm quoting: "I hope that there will be no persecutions, no bloody work after the war is over. No one need expect me to take any part in hanging or killing these men, even the worst of them. Frighten them out of the country, open the gates, let down the bars, scare them off, but enough lives have been sacrificed."

That's one approach, but that is not the approach of the leaders of the Congressional Republicans, some of whom would've wished for there to be some treason trials and executions, but short of that they want a Reconstruction that's going to reshape the American polity, rewrite the U.S. Constitution, and remake Southern society. Anyone I ever run into who says "Reconstruction's too complicated and not interesting," I don't understand it, because how can you have that kind of thing happening and it not be interesting?

But I found Melville, sorry. Let me leave you with this. Spare the poets. Melville wrote this little poem, after Lincoln was murdered. Listen to what he says. "Good

Friday was the day Of the prodigy and crime, When they killed him in his pity, When they killed him in his prime Of clemency and calm--When with yearning he was filled To redeem the evil-willed, And, though conqueror, be kind; But they killed him in his kindness, In their madness and their blindness, And they killed him from behind. There is sobbing of the strong, And a pall upon the land; But the People in their weeping Bare an iron hand; Beware the People weeping When they bare the iron hand. He lieth in his blood--the father in his face; They have killed him, the Forgiver--The Avenger now takes his place, The Avenger wisely stern, Who in righteousness shall do What the heavens call him to, And the parricides remand; For they killed him in his kindness, In their madness and their blindness, And his blood is on their hand. There is sobbing of the strong, And a pall upon the land; But the People in their weeping Bare the iron hand; Beware the People weeping When they bare an iron hand." The whole history of Reconstruction has always been a debate really over how iron the hand should've been. Thank you, see you next week.

[end of transcript]

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Civil War and Reconstruction: Lecture 21 TranscriptApril 8, 2008<< back

Professor David Blight: Reconstruction is that period of American history that I think still--I know still--is short-shrifted in the ways people tend to learn American history in this society, for whatever the reasons. Part of the reason may be that it's messy and complicated, and part of the reason may be that it's full of violence, and part of the reason may be that it's just not as easy to find good heroes, and part of the reason may be that it comes after such a total, all out, and some may say, in so many ways a glorious war. Or as Kenneth Stampp, a great historian, once put it, until 1865 there was glory enough to go around, but after 1865 where was the glory? It's also been a period in which we've almost insisted--and I wonder just how you have learned about this before; if this were a smaller class I would ask you--but it's as though our culture still insists, from this period of our history, that it be a melodrama, some kind of melodrama with, well, a sufficient number of heroes and a sufficient number of villains, and a melodrama that usually ends up with a story of an oppressed South, much in need of our sympathy.

Now, I've put a piece of words up here in front of you. I walked back to see if you could read it. I do think most of you in the room can read it. Just hold onto the papers until the end, please. This is the Thirteenth Amendment. We're going to look at the Thirteenth and the Fourteenth today, or at least I'll get you up to the Fourteenth Amendment. If the Civil War and Reconstruction were a second founding--and I'll put the "if" on that, although for the next three weeks I'm going to argue that--if it was a second founding, a second revolution of some kind, that second founding is in the Thirteenth, the Fourteenth, the Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution. Read the Thirteenth with me. It's the simplest, shortest--other than the actual parts of the Bill of Rights--it's the simplest, shortest amendment in the U.S. Constitution. It outlaws slavery and involuntary servitude, except for imprisonment for crime. And then it has that very, very simple Section Two: "Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation. That is almost, in some ways, a précis for what Reconstruction will become. What will constitute appropriate legislation to enforce black freedom?

I put it up today in part, too, because just this weekend I was out lecturing in Springfield, Illinois at the new Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library; and it's a magnificent place if you haven't been there. It's a museum full of lots of wax figures. There's at least one life size wax of Lincoln in every bloody room, sometimes two of them, and then they use holograms and he appears all over the place. It's a little weird

and scary. But at the end of the whole day and evening they took me down in the vault and asked me if I wanted to see some special documents and special possessions. They showed me one of Lincoln's three existing top hats, they showed me the cast of his hand; I got to touch. They showed me personal notes he wrote to pardon deserters from the Union Army. They showed me all kinds of things. But one of the things they showed me was the original draft, the handwritten draft by the clerk of the House of Representatives, of the Thirteenth Amendment, and then signed by "A. Lincoln" and most of the members of the House, at least those who chose to sign it. And I realized, "damn, that thing is real." And maybe someday I can live to see the Fourteenth Amendment. Back to the Fourteenth in a moment. Sorry about that, that's not the Fourteenth Amendment, that's just the outline.

Now, a few overall thoughts on Reconstruction, to just give you some hooks to hang your hat on before we look back again at this question of Reconstruction during the war, and then after Lincoln's death the fight that ensues, quickly, between the new president, Andrew Johnson, and the Congressional leadership that the Republican Party--soon now to be known as the Radical Republicans--and what will become a great constitutional crisis over who will control Reconstruction and what Reconstruction will be. Reconstruction, though, is often seen--it is indeed an era of almost gargantuan aspirations, if you think about what they were trying to achieve, and tragic failures. But it's also an era of sudden and unprecedented legal, political, and constitutional change. It's also a period of tremendous social and political violence. We've never experienced anything in America--other than sanctioned war, which the Civil War of course had been--we've never, ever experienced social and political violence on the scale which you'll see in Reconstruction. In fact there's a whole batch of books coming out now on Reconstruction violence, and I suspect this has a lot to do with living in the age of terrorism; publishers are really promoting the subject. You're reading one of them that's just been out a year or two by Nicholas Lemann called Redemption. More on that in a week or two.

In another way, Reconstruction was one long, ten, eleven year agonizing referendum on the meaning of the war. What had the war meant? That's what Reconstruction was trying to explain, trying to settle, trying to codify. What had actually been the verdict at Appomattox? When Lee surrendered and then Johnston surrendered and the Confederate Army surrendered, what was the verdict? Who got to determine it? Who had really won the war, and what had they won? What cause had lost? Now, someone really won this war and someone really lost this war. This is not one of those wars where you can say, "You know, nobody ever wins a war." Nonsense. Union victory is real, Confederate defeat was virtually total, in a military sense. But what was the South to lose? One of the greatest challenges of Reconstruction was to determine how you take this massive, national blood feud, of unimaginable scale that's beginning, and

then reconcile it into a new nation? The problem, in part, is that the survivors on both sides in this war would still have to inhabit the same land and the same country. It wasn't as though an actual foreign country had been conquered and defeated. It was part of North America, it was part of the U.S.--or soon to be New U.S. of some kind. And the side that lost is going to have to in time inhabit the same government. How? Where do you go in precedent? Where do you in history? Where do you go in the Constitution? Where do you look this up, to put Humpty Dumpty back together again?

Put another way, the task was how to make the eventual logic of sectional reconciliation--knitting North and South back together--how to make the eventual logic of sectional reconciliation somehow compatible with the logic of that revolution that was put in place in 1863--or in other words, Emancipation? And by logic, I mean you have to put North and South back together, but you also now have to deal with the fact the slaves have been freed to some new status. Got to do both. Put another way, how do you square black freedom and all the stirrings of--the possibility at least--of racial equality now with that cause, in the South, that had lost everything--except its faith in white supremacy? How do you fold black freedom into white supremacy? How do you fold white supremacy into black freedom? Can they ever be--could those ever be reconciled? And what if they can't? Lincoln spoke of a testing in the Gettysburg Address--if you remember the famous speech--testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived could long endure. The testing of the war in some ways would become easier than the testing the country would now face with Reconstruction. Or finally put yet another way--and I wrote about this at too much length in a book called Race and Reunion--the challenge of Reconstruction, and it's the challenge we've had ever since, is how do you do two profound things at the same time? One was healing and the other was justice. How do you have them both? What truly constitutes healing of a people, of a nation, that's suffered this scale of violence and destruction, and how do you have justice? And justice for whom?

Here's what Lincoln said, next-to-the-last day of his life; no, three days before he was shot. It was his last public utterance, from a balcony at the White House. He was discussing Reconstruction. His audience that day wanted to just hear about the glories of the ending of the war, and he gave them a little mini lecture on Reconstruction because it's precisely what he was dealing with. He said this: "Reconstruction is pressed much more closely upon our attention now. It is fraught with great difficulty. Unlike the case of a war between independent nations, there is no authorized organ for us to treat with. No one man has authority to give up the rebellion for any other man. We simply must begin with, and mold from, disorganized and discordant elements, with all. So new and unprecedented is the whole case that no exclusive and inflexible plan can safely be prescribed as to detail, but important principles must be inflexible." That's classic Lincoln. "No one plan must we necessarily commit to, but we must stick

to some principles." It's Lincoln the pragmatist trying to figure it out. And then he's dead.

But back to wartime, at least for a few minutes. The debate over Reconstruction, as it will play out through the next three years, four years, really five years, up to 1870/71, is the debate that ensued between Lincoln and his own party leadership in Congress, as early as late 1863. Here's Lincoln's plan again, and you can read all of this in Foner's Short History of Reconstruction, but let me give it to you at least in brief terms. You'll remember I said the other day that Lincoln wanted Reconstruction to be presidential, lenient, and quick. He was openly friendly to Southerners his whole life, as I suppose everybody knows. His four brother-in-laws had fought for the Confederacy, et cetera, et cetera. He was born in Kentucky. He did not really have any kind of personal vindictiveness towards Southerners the way many others in the Republican Party will have; and they'll have reasons to have that. Some have argued, as Kenneth Stampp once did, that Lincoln actually had a deep personal need for personal absolution; that he carried this horrifying burden of all that death, and that he took it as his personal responsibility, and that this charity for all and malice toward none, and the leniency in Lincoln's Reconstruction ideas is somehow rooted in that sense of personal responsibility for all the suffering. There may be something to that.

But his Reconstruction policy, such as he put it in place, at least for awhile, was rooted in his Constitutional philosophy. Lincoln, number one, believed secession had never happened, that secession was essentially impossible, a state could not secede from the Union. He chose language carefully, as a good lawyer. He said as states, the Southern states, the Confederate states, were still in the Union, technically, during the war. Even though they seceded, they were simply, in his language, out of their normal relationship to the Union; whatever the hell that's supposed to mean. And they fought this total war against the United States but they were not really out of the Union. Now that's a legal position, rest assured. He made a distinction between states and governments. He said that governments may have failed and committed--he never used the word treason--made rebellion against the United States, but as states, an Alabama never ceased to exist. Okay. He's famous for saying things like "physically we cannot separate." His idea was to squash the rebellion, let a number of loyal citizens, in one of those seceded states, create a new loyal government, restore that state to the Union as quickly as possible, even before the war ends, by presidential authority, under presidential war powers, and begin a process before you'd ever have a surrender of what he was already calling restoration, or reunification. He wanted it done by executive authority. That wasn't necessarily a personal power grab by any means but he wanted to do it under presidential war powers, because he did understand, to the extent anybody could predict the future, that once the war did end, Congress's powers would rise. A president is never so powerful as in time of war.

Now, pause with me for a moment. What they're all thinking about now--Lincoln, the Republican leadership of Congress, anybody thinking about Reconstruction, during the war or even in the immediate aftermath--is really thinking about a set of questions, somewhat like those big questions I started with, but more specifically. This is what they have to think about now. And if you think American statesmen have been challenged at other times in our history, how would you like to have this challenge? Three main questions. (1) Who would rule in the South, who? Who gets to vote? Who gets to hold office; ex-Confederates, black people, whites who'd been loyal? How do you determine this? (2) Who will rule in the federal government, Congress or the President, in this unprecedented blank slate set of issues? The country had never faced this before. How do you reconstruct a Union? How do you re-admit states into the Union? There's no blueprint in the Constitution. There are hints, depending on how you interpret it. And (3) what will the dimensions of black freedom be, in law and in practice and in social life, on the ground, in the South? All the while remembering this all must occur now in these desperate conditions of poverty, destruction, starvation and tremendous untold, as yet not even fully fathomed, bitterness and hatred. Or let me give you one last little question. I love asking questions I don't have to stand up right now and answer. Would Reconstruction be a preservation of something old, or the creation of something truly new? And if it's going to be new, how new?

Back to the war years. Lincoln issued, on December 8, 1863, his State of the Union or annual message--part of his annual message--what he called the Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction. It was issued December '63. Remember the dates here, because this first major debate on Reconstruction is going to occur in some of the most terrible months of the war, and yet in Washington they're also having this debate. There were several parts to this, but three main ones. It's Lincoln's classic lenient, rapid, moderate and presidential Reconstruction. It's called the Ten-Percent Plan. He, number one, would pardon all ex-Confederates, with a certain list of exceptions. High-ranking Confederate officials--although he didn't entirely clarify how high ranking--they wouldn't be pardoned, at least yet. He would not pardon those who had resigned commissions in the judiciary or in Congress, to support the Confederacy. And he put in a clause that said he would not pardon those who could be convicted of mistreating black soldiers, of which there'd been a great deal of, and he was under some pressure to do something about that, by late '63. And then he said when ten percent of the voting population of a given Southern state--and that voting population was determined by how many voters in 1860--when ten percent of the male voting population--because that's the only people who could vote--would take an oath to the Union and establish a new government, then he as president, under presidential war powers, would recognize them and readmit them to the Union, just like that. Blacks were excluded from the entire process. There was no mention, at that point, of any black suffrage.

He wants ten percent. Now, right away members of his own party and Congress are saying, "Wait a second Mr. President, what about the other ninety percent?" Well Lincoln's idea was if you can establish a pocket of people in lower Louisiana or upland Alabama, or part of Virginia that the Union troops occupy, and you get, if you can get ten percent of that state to take a loyalty oath and elect some kind of little rump legislature that can meet somewhere, like Wheeling, West Virginia, where they did for awhile, then he would call that the real Virginia, or the real Louisiana, and they'd be back in the Union. And his idea was that you would begin then a political process of reunification. A political process would already be in place, as messy as it might be, as seemingly undemocratic as it might be, before the war would end. This actually happened. Well he didn't--they didn't get admitted to the Union, but so-called Lincoln governments were established in three states, again where Union armies had significant occupation of the soil of that state--Louisiana, Tennessee and Arkansas--and so-called Lincoln governments were created there, in 1864 and early 1865. They were pitifully weak governments. They would've collapsed entirely without federal troops to protect them, and Lincoln did this utterly without consulting with Congress. And we like to make a great deal of Abraham Lincoln as the greatest president, and he was; a political genius, and he was; magical with the music of words, and he was; et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And I was just out at the Lincoln Library where you can be sure Lincoln is God. But not consulting with Congress on this one wasn't the wisest thing he ever did.

Congress began to react with great hostility, in 1864. Some Radical Republicans sincerely believed that these new Lincoln governments were not only wrong and undemocratic, but dangerous, and they wanted much, much more to even consider the reconstruction of a Southern state, on any basis. They were led--they being the Republicans in Congress--by the two men on your right, Thaddeus Stevens on the top and Charles Sumner on the bottom. Stevens, a Congressman from Pennsylvania who grew up and lived near Gettysburg; fascinating, interesting, driven, passionate, complicated, club-footed man; a brilliant lawyer, and a radical, and an old abolitionist, although he had some complications along the way. Stevens and Sumner. Sumner the great Senator from Massachusetts--the Sumner who had had the brains nearly beaten out of him by Preston Brooks in the Senate in 1856, who left the Senate for nearly three and a half years and went all over the world to spas to try to put his head back together, including spending most of a year in Switzerland--was very, very much back in the game during the war; and he rose in power, of course, as the emancipation issue rose to the fore, as did Stevens. And the two of them led the response to Lincoln's ideas on Reconstruction from the two different houses of Congress.

They had different names for their proposals, but they essentially argued the same thing; although Sumner's, you could argue, was even more radical. Stevens called his

approach, or his constitutional approach, conquered provinces. He said not only did the Southern states secede from the Union, they should be reverted to the status of unorganized territories; or, even further he went, he said now they're not only going to have to be put under territorial status, but they should be treated like a foreign nation that the United States has conquered, a conquered province of a foreign land. They had been reduced by force of arms, they had made war upon the United States, and under international law, Stevens argued, they should be treated as, quote, his words, "conquered foreign land," subject to whatever the United States shall choose to do with it. Sumner, for his part, called this theory--it was even more direct--State Suicide. That was pretty clear. He said not only had the Southern states seceded from the Union, they committed political suicide. They do not exist. They experienced what he called, in his words, "instant forfeiture of their status as states." They therefore must be reverted to what he called "the status of unorganized territories," as though Alabama was back in 1820, Virginia was back in 1787, or whatever year they officially became a state--I'm sorry, before that even, during the Revolution. And therefore, in both cases, Stevens or Sumner's plan, all authority to re-admit any Southern state or determine the process, the means by which, the laws by which a state would be re-instituted into the Union, came under Congressional authority because only Congress has the power to readmit new states. Take that, Abraham Lincoln.

They issued this theory to Lincoln in what was known as the Wade-Davis Bill in July--4th of July to be exact--1864. Note the date. This is in the midst of the stalemate in Virginia; it's just after Cold Harbor; Grant has just begun to put Petersburg under siege; the terrible bloodletting in Virginia is coming in and the thousands and thousands of names on casualty lists, and Congress issues what's known as the Wade-Davis Bill, named for Senator Benjamin Wade of Ohio, a strong anti-slavery Radical Republican, and Henry Winter Davis, a Congressman from Maryland, also of at least moderate anti-slavery credentials. What you have here is the blueprint of Radical Reconstruction, at least the beginning blueprint. The Wade-Davis Bill said, they took--the first part of it--was they took Lincoln's Ten-Percent idea, ten percent of the voting population of a Southern state, and they required a majority of white male citizens of a Southern state who must, secondly, take what the Radicals called an Ironclad Oath, and that oath said that they had to get up and swear they had never participated in the Confederate war effort or aided and abetted it. Now, immediately you're wondering how in hell are you going to find a majority of the white males of Georgia, or Alabama, or Mississippi, or any other Confederate state that can get up and take that oath? The answer is you couldn't. To the congressional leadership that was just fine for now. The Ironclad Oath was a political message, it was a symbolic oath. They knew you'd never get a majority of whites who could take this. The third part, they said all officers above the rank of lieutenant, and all civil officers of all

kinds in the Confederacy would not only be not pardoned, they would be disfranchised forever, declared not--the actual language in the bill was, "not a citizen of the United States." It was almost as though they were giving every office holder, every officer, lieutenant and above, who was still alive in the South, an invitation to leave the country, because if they stayed in America they would be men without a country. They did not set up, in spite of the lore that's set in over the years, a plan of arrest, indictments, and executions. They didn't do that at all. But they did decide they were going to treat the Southern states as conquered enemies.

They sent the bill to Lincoln, and Lincoln did what many presidents have done, he gave it a pocket veto. You know what that is. He simply let the bill die without either signing it, or vetoing it, or to some extent even answering it; although he did finally answer it. He answered it actually four days after the bill was delivered to him, in what he titled "The Proclamation on the Wade-Davis Bill." And this was a classic Lincolnesque statement as well. It was conciliatory. He thanked them profusely for their work on this sensitive and terrible issue, and he didn't completely reject it. He refused, he said, to be, quote, "inflexibly committed to any one plan." "Okay Abe, but what are you committed to?" is what congressmen began to say. He was verbally willing to listen, but he really did not placate the Radicals. They had an impasse here, a big impasse. And note how deep the impasse is, it's constitutional. Who's going to run Reconstruction? Me, the president, or you the Congress?

Well, the congressional leadership followed Lincoln's little Proclamation on the Wade-Davis Bill with what they called The Wade-Davis Manifesto, and they published it in national newspapers. It was published on August 5, 1864. It was an unprecedented, vehement attack on a sitting president by the leadership in Congress of his own party. They lambasted Lincoln. They attacked him on two grounds. They said his approach to Reconstruction was simply way too lenient--and they're arguing this now in August of 1864, with these thousands upon thousands of casualties flowing in. This is the very time Lincoln comes to believe he's not likely to be re-elected. And there were some members in particularly the Radical wing of the Republican Party who'd been laboring to dump Lincoln from the ticket all summer, and probably could've succeeded in doing it if there wasn't so much at stake. And they went a second step. They actually accused him of usurpation of presidential powers, an impeachable offense if anyone ever cared to take it any further step. Here's the key, as the dispute emerged that summer. Lincoln viewed Reconstruction as a means to weakening the Confederacy and winning the war. Think of it as a political strategy, that ten percent idea, trying to get some fledgling little state legislature and government, somehow get two or three of them into the Union. It was a strategy, and not a blueprint written in stone for the way Reconstruction would always be. But to the Radical Republicans, they viewed this as a much more far-reaching transformation

in a building really of a new nation, when and if they could win the war. They really were at an impasse.

Now you know from our previous lectures and your reading that the fall of Mobile Bay on August 5, the same day as the Wade-Davis Manifesto, Admiral Farragut took Mobile Bay. That had a tremendous impact on public opinion. Then on September 3 or 4 Atlanta fell. It had an even greater impact on public opinion. And of course you've got the presidential race now happening in the fall, and Lincoln is re-elected. This impasse on Reconstruction, though, basically just sat there until Lincoln's death. In the meantime he cooperated, and so did they, on two tremendous pieces of legislation, on two great enactments. One is the Thirteenth Amendment, which we just discussed; and I want to come back to that in a moment. Well actually I'll mention it now. The fact that it got passed is fairly remarkable; that it got passed at all is fairly remarkable. It is, first of all, an amendment that Lincoln himself by late '64 began to advocate, especially after his re-election, vehemently advocate, and it's something exactly that the Radical Republicans want. They were absolutely on the same page on it. And the reason Lincoln was--well he had moral reasons to believe slavery should now be eradicated in the Constitution, make no mistake. But he also had reason to want this Constitutional Amendment because he feared, and rightly so, that if the war ended, with only the Emancipation Proclamation as the legal sanction for all those freed slaves, that there would be nothing to stop Southerners from thousands upon thousands of law suits in federal courts, suing under Fifth Amendment for their property. And it would've--it did happen, to some extent anyway, but if you can get it in the Constitution as a constitutional amendment, then they would have no right to sue for property that is no longer property. So a lot was at stake. They wanted a Thirteenth Amendment because of the potential invalidity of the Emancipation Proclamation legally; they wanted to remove legal doubt. And you'll remember that the Proclamation had only freed slaves in the states in rebellion. Technically slaves in Kentucky, Missouri, Delaware, Maryland, were still in a kind of limbo.

It passed the House of Representatives on January 31, 1865, but it was not easy. You might think you live in the United States of America and of course there'd be a Thirteenth Amendment--finally, of course, we would outlaw slavery in the Constitution. The vote was 119 to 56; it passed by two votes--it takes a two-thirds majority for a constitutional amendment--it passed by two votes. Lincoln began to twist arms; he began to have personal meetings with a select little list of Democrats. They didn't have a two-thirds majority of Republicans. They needed some Democrats to vote for this. And by far the majority of Democrats wanted nothing to do with outlawing slavery in the Constitution, but about eight of them came over. And on the day that it was passed there was unprecedented rejoicing in the House of Representatives. The whole hall was full; congressmen, we're told, started yelling,

crying, hugging each other, dancing on the tops of their desks--God knows why, in part because of the importance, the gravity of the issue, and in part perhaps because they'd lived through so much agony in the war, they truly had something to celebrate. You have to go to individual diaries and letters to really see it. There was a Republican who recorded in his diary that day, quote, "Members joined in the shouting and kept it up for some minutes. Some embraced one another. Others wept like children. I have felt ever since the vote as though I live in a new country." Frederick Douglass's son, Lewis, veteran of the 54th Massachusetts, in his uniform was sitting in the balcony, on the afternoon the Thirteenth Amendment was passed. His father was back home in Rochester. He immediately wrote his father a note, that I've read. It said, "Father, you should've been here today. Today was your day."

And then at the same time that Congress, with Lincoln's strong approval, worked on a bill to create the Freedmen's Bureau, an unprecedented agency in American history, certainly to that time. Formerly called the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands, it passed Congress on the 3rd of March, 1865, just a day before Lincoln's Second Inaugural. It was social reform by military force. Americans had never done this before--a national, federal, social welfare agency, in a land that had lived and breathed laissez-faire government; in a land that had lived and breathed this idea that governments don't provide food for people, people provide food for people, healthcare, schools. Well the war, of course, had forced a new kind of history. The basic purposes of the Freedmen's Bureau, when it was set up, was to aid refugees and displaced people, black or white. And the estimate--and I may have used this before--the estimate on the ground in the South, by late winter 1865, was that there were at least a quarter million totally displaced starving white people; much less the four million soon to be liberated slaves. The Freedmen's Bureau was to provide all kinds of physical supplies, medical services, schools where it could. Its purpose was also legal, to supervise contracts between freedmen and employees--more on that later. And its job--and this was an impossible task--but its job and its title was to manage confiscated and abandoned land. Yes, property. But who really owns it now? If the Union Army took your plantation, who owns it? And there is nothing more primal, of course, especially to Americans, than property.

Now, more on the Freedmen's Bureau later, but it was a terribly important piece of legislation. It passed with majorities in both houses, of course, because the Republicans had those majorities, and Lincoln gladly signed it, and it established, at least, an agency to be put in place once the war was over. Now, let me take the last few minutes and set up what is now to happen between old Andrew Johnson and this same leadership of the Radical Republicans once Lincoln was gone. This is the classic struggle of Reconstruction, Johnson and the Radicals. Now first of all, how did Andrew Johnson get on Lincoln's ticket? Why did Abraham Lincoln choose Andrew

Johnson as his running mate? I've often put this to major Lincoln scholars. Now look, I confess, I'm a great admirer of Lincoln, like most people. But he couldn't do everything perfectly. And he gave us Andrew Johnson, and we've never held him responsible for that. And I'm not willing to give him a total pass on that one, because Andrew Johnson ranks down there just about minus two on the list of presidents, I think, of all time. Well how's that for directness? Sorry about that. If you're an Andrew Johnson fan, you're lonely. [laughter]

He's on the ticket in '64 because--you know this?--he's the only senator from a seceded Confederate state who didn't secede with a state. He stayed in the Union, from Tennessee. He's a complicated guy. God, he could've been interesting. He had some big flaws. I'm going to leave you with a little background on Andrew Johnson. As you can tell from the syllabus I've put myself nearly a full lecture behind in the course, but don't you worry, because we're planning for Reading Week a special review session when I can give another lecture. Aren't you happy? There's an old saying about Andrew Johnson that, quote, "old Andy never went back on his raisin'," his raising up. He's from East Tennessee. He was born in North Carolina. He grew up illiterate. He once owned eleven slaves, although he did free them. He moved to East Tennessee with his wife, Polly, who taught him his literacy. He grew up a Jacksonian Democrat. His God was Andrew Jackson. If lovers of the New Deal believe FDR was somehow the son of God, as my grandparents did, Andrew Johnson thought Andrew Jackson was the son of God. In 1861 he was the only Southern senator who did not secede with his state. In 1862 Lincoln appointed him the War Governor of Tennessee, in the occupied parts of Tennessee, out of which Lincoln eventually was going to--he did try to create a new government. Andrew Johnson was his governor. It took tremendous courage to be a Unionist in Tennessee during the Civil War. There was a lot of Unionism in East Tennessee, and in '64 Lincoln needed a border state running mate. After all, who had been his running mate before? Totally forgettable I realize; no one ever remembers the vice-presidents from--anybody remember vice-presidents from the twentieth century? Only those who get Nobel Prizes do we really remember I guess. But Hannibal Hamlin of New Hampshire had been Lincoln's running mate. Now what good is a New Hampshirite on the ticket in '64? A New Hampshirite was useful in '60 but not in '64. So he dumps Hannibal Hamlin, in spite of the alliteration of his name, and goes for a political choice. What could send a better Unionist message to the border states than Andrew Johnson, the only Southern senator who doesn't secede from his seat?

Well, all was pretty well, at least until the inauguration. Andrew Johnson, unfortunately, was drunk at his inauguration as Vice-President of the United States. Now his explanation for that is that he had a terrible tooth infection and he'd been sloshing down whiskey all morning. But they literally had to stand him up, prop him

up and point him in the right direction, and practically raise his hand. On the day he was inaugurated, when Lincoln delivered the Second Inaugural, AJ had to be removed to a back room. Not an auspicious beginning. Last thought. By far the most important thing about Andrew Johnson though, in spite of his early comments when he said, "Treason must be made odious," and Charles Sumner said, "Oh, he's speaking my language," the thing we must know about Andrew Johnson is number one, he was a virulent white supremacist, he was an ardent states' rightist. Yes he was a states' rightist and a Unionist. It's entirely possible to be that. He also hated the southern planter class. He was never anti-slavery. He was not only not anti-slavery, he was an open racist. He believed the United States should remain, in his own words, "a white man's country forever." And he had a disposition that could best charitably be described as hypersensitive and obstinate. He was not a flexible politician. Well, I'll leave you with old Andrew Johnson, now into the story and messing things up, and I'll see you Thursday.

[end of transcript]

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Civil War and Reconstruction: Lecture 22 TranscriptApril 10, 2008<< back

Professor David Blight: I was in a meeting some months ago of the New York Historical Society's Board of Trustees; august, wonderful group of people. That's about thirty-five very rich New Yorkers and two token historians, and I'm one of the token historians. They have us there for window dressing, and other good and useful and noble purposes. And during a discussion of a subject I won't even go into, one of the very intelligent and very dedicated members of that board--and I'm not being ironic--said that he really wished American history could be about "people of goodwill." He wished American history wasn't so full of conflict. In effect, he was asking "why can't we really just tell the stories about people of goodwill?" And I remember thinking, "Oh dear, this poor man." But of course I didn't say anything, kept my mouth shut. I nearly threw up, and I just went home, about my business. But why can't history just be about people of goodwill? I'll leave that to you, to figure out. Sometimes there is a great deal of goodwill and sometimes there isn't.

Now, Reconstruction is a classic story of--we've said this already--great change, great experimentation, change forced upon people in some ways--as we'll see with the Fourteenth Amendment in a moment--and yet enough of a cadre of leadership accepted that challenge and rewrote the country you live in. And yet, of course, like all great change, it caused a tremendous--and if there's a Newton's Law of history--an opposite and equal reaction. Revolutions always cause counter-revolutions, just count on it. Look throughout American History just for a moment. Let's play some games of historical cycles just for a moment. Think of the greatest, take your pick, the greatest fundamental changes in American History, whether that's in society, the law, politics, massive immigration that changed the demographics of the country--take your pick, but pick three or four of the greatest moments of change in American History. Every one of them caused a counter-change. Every revolution we have causes a counter-revolution. You grew up reaping the great changes of the Civil Rights Revolution. You take them for granted, most of us do. But you also came of age in the midst of the counter-revolution against it. If you experienced the Civil War and Reconstruction in America, you experienced a revolution, in many ways perhaps even more fundamental, than the one in the '60's and '70s, and you experienced very quickly its counter-revolution.

Now, I just want to say that because the more you read about Reconstruction, the more it seems to me you find serious writers on Reconstruction, historians or otherwise, and not a lot of popular writers and journalists have discovered

Reconstruction. We're going to read a book by one of them, Nick Lemann, who's the Dean of the Journalism School at Columbia, who in quite good ways fashions himself a historian. He always says he's not a real historian, blah-blah-blah-blah-blah, but he did pretty good research for this book on violence, largely in Mississippi in 1875, but he's using it as a window into the counter-revolution you're soon to be reading about. But most people who write about this period now tend to do it in tones of a kind of a requiem; a requiem, a tragic mode, a mode that is always saying what might have been, what was attempted, what was aimed for, but then failed, fell apart; what high aspiration, but God they couldn't quite do it. And it is a national requiem, in a sense. Somebody should write that symphony, the Reconstruction Symphony. We need a Beethoven for that, and he needs to be really depressed one day. But that doesn't mean it won't be great and we won't learn from it, feel from it.

All right, back on the ground. I got in some cheap shots on Andrew Johnson before we left the other day, and they were that, cheap shots; no apologies. But Andrew Johnson's, of course, a key player here. He comes to the presidency because he's Lincoln's running mate, he and his office saying he's going to make treason odious. And some Radical Republicans were quite fond, initially, of that approach, but it quickly, quickly changed, and here in a nutshell--you've read this now in Foner, you've all gotten up through at least the first four chapters. And by the way, I've now visited at least three sections, and I'm enjoying it. I wish they weren't just 50 minutes. You just get going and--of course this just gets going and then--you're glad we're out of here in 50 minutes I'm sure. But back to Andrew Johnson. He was, above all else, an ardent States' Rightist. He did not support Secession. Now you can be a States' Rightist, you can believe that power should always remain in the hands of the state and still not believe in the right of Secession. And he was one of those. He believed secession was political suicide for the South, and lo and behold he got that one right. He had a strong attachment to the American Union. He was a Unionist, and a patriot in that sense. He had a hatred also of the Southern planter class because he didn't grow up in it. He was a poor boy who made good; had a huge chip on his shoulder. He was brilliant at a certain kind of politics, which was East Tennessee stump politics. Andrew Johnson, it was said, could crawl up on the back of a wagon and hold an audience for two hours, in East Tennessee. He didn't very easily convert that style and that talent at local stump politics, however, to the much broader world of pragmatic negotiation of Washington or the presidency. He'd held every kind of office you could hold. He'd been mayor of Greenville, Tennessee; he'd been a state senator or state legislator; he'd been governor of Tennessee. He was then elected Senator from Tennessee and then once again appointed the wartime Governor of Tennessee by Abraham Lincoln in the midst of the war. He'd held every level of office. He'd never been anti-slavery. He saw the end of slavery as a misfortune for the South, something that had to be accepted as a verdict of war.

But Johnson had one essential slogan for his approach to Reconstruction, and if you can remember that slogan you in essence have his point of view: the Constitution as it is and the Union as it was. The Constitution as it is and the Union as it was. Don't revise the Constitution. He would accept the Thirteenth Amendment, the end of slavery, because that's part of the verdict of the war, there wasn't any way around that, but he never accepted the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, and he worked vehemently to destroy the Fourteenth Amendment, or at least he worked vehemently to urge states not to ratify it. Now, his approach to Reconstruction, once in office, was essentially this. He took Lincoln's lenient plan, The Ten Percent Plan, and he went another step further in its leniency, or some say several steps further. Instead of saying he wanted ten percent of the voting population of the Confederate states to take loyalty oaths, form a government, come back and so forth, he simply converted ten percent to, quote, "that portion who are loyal." Any portion, wherever may be two or more are gathered, will have a loyal government; that portion who are loyal.

Now, he added one exception to the pardons, however. You remember people were going to get pardoned, lieutenant and above, and so forth--I mean, lieutenant and below in the Confederate forces. He added one exception to the pardons, and this reflected a very personal interest of his. He would not pardon, he said at first at least, any Southerner who owned $20,000.00 worth of property or more. It seemed like a class appeal. Nobody who owned $20,000.00-- the planter class, in other words, was not going to get a pardon, no matter what they did during the war; if they were rich they weren't going to be pardoned, well at least until they applied for it, and the application had to be personal to the President of the United States. Now, this set in motion, in 1865, a bizarre process. He promised clemency but only after they made formal written applications about their new loyalty. And what literally occurred, by the end of 1865 and especially in the first months of 1866, is lines formed at the White House in Washington, often women. Southern women came to--lines outdoors, on a daily basis at times--with their written applications for clemency and pardon, for participation in the Confederate war effort. After one year of this process, by May 1866, Johnson himself had personally signed 7000 such pardons. He wanted to make them grovel, in other words. Not a wise policy, but a policy nonetheless.

He did put in place, or tried, some so-called Johnson governments. Now instead of calling them Lincoln governments they would be called Johnson governments. And the reason Johnson could get away with this, of course, as you should know from reading, is that Congress went out of session in the summer of 1865--for months, they went out of session--and Johnson had largely a free hand to act, and did he ever. By December of '65, when a new Congress would reconvene in Washington, all the states in the former Confederacy, except Texas, had met the simplest of criteria, had written new state constitutions, had found "that portion who are loyal" to form a new

government. And it was very tiny proportions in some places. In fact, there were no loyalty oaths, even applied to people. All but one state, Texas, was ready for readmission to the Union, under this--what actually Foner calls it in his book--quote, "amazing leniency of Andrew Johnson." The only major demand put upon them was to formally nullify their Act of Secession. That's basically all they had to do.

Now, these were whites-only governments, these were governments formed by former Confederates, and in many of these states, of course, they began to rapidly, in the late summer/early fall 1865, pass what became quickly known as the Black Codes. You've actually got a portion of the Virginia Black Codes in the Gienapp reader. Three or four of those laws are there in your reader; read them, with some care. These Black Codes mirrored the old Slave Codes. They explicitly denied the right to vote to blacks, the right to serve on juries, the right to hold office, the right to own property. There were all kinds of restrictive vagrancy laws passed; pass laws passed, where blacks could be at any given point in time, with or without a pass. And in this newly reconstructed Johnson approach to these states, there was a great deal of legislation already flowing from some of these new state legislatures meant to directly obstruct the work of the Freedmen's Bureau. The counter-revolution folks began almost as soon as the war was over, as soon as ex-Confederates could find their way into power. And did they ever.

Part of what went on here in the Northern mind--now let's remember, the blood of the war is not entirely dry--but part of what was simply going on here in the Northern mind as they witnessed this, and as these new states now sent their representatives and senators, after Fall election, back to Washington, some of them literally wearing their Confederate uniforms. And from Georgia came no less than as the new U.S. Senator from Georgia, Alexander H. Stephens. A year ago he was the Vice-President of the Confederacy who had spent six months in a Charlestown jail in Massachusetts, allegedly arrested for his treason against the United States, but released. And as they began to arrive in Washington, it was this kind of insolence on the part of ex-Confederates that in some ways began to stimulate what we will call Radical Reconstruction.

Radical Reconstruction is a plan. And Foner's right on that. He said one of the reasons that this cadre of Republicans succeeded is because they really did have a plan. If there's a revolution going on and something's got to be redone about your country, go to the meeting with a plan. James Madison did that, by the way, at the original drafting of the Constitution, and he got most of what he took. But they came back to Washington with ex-Confederate generals, colonels, members of the Confederate Cabinet and the Vice-President of the Confederacy. Jeff Davis couldn't get elected in Mississippi yet because Jeff Davis was still the only ex-Confederate still in jail. He

will never be formally indicted. He spent two years at Fortress Monroe, in a prison, in Virginia. Tremendous mythology has gone around that story that he wasn't fed properly, that he was mistreated, that he got ill and wasn't given medical attention, virtually all of which is nonsense. He wasn't terribly well at times but it wasn't because he didn't get medical attention. By the time the United States Government, under the Johnson Administration--in fact Johnson wanted absolutely nothing to do with trying Jefferson Davis--but by the time they even got around to finally formally considering it, they had wasted so much time that Jefferson Davis will finally be formally released in the spring--April to be exact--of 1867, two years after his arrest. And just to show you the harbingers of reconciliation in the political culture, the people who paid his bail were all Northerners, some of them quite famous. Horace Greeley, the great editor of the New York Herald-Tribune and the former abolitionist, although a strange and mercurial character by now, put up the most amount, and none other than Garret Smith--the former radical abolitionist from upstate New York, who checked himself into an insane asylum after John Brown's raid--paid most of the rest of the bail. And Jefferson Davis would be released, April 1867, to a cheering crowd in Richmond, Virginia. He would go on to write; to live in the South, of course, and to write the longest and most turgid, the most overblown personal memoir about a failed political movement in all of history; about 1300 page memoir, basically all arguing that secession was right and the war wasn't about slavery. Enough on Davis for the moment. But back to Washington.

When these new state governments send their representatives to Congress, beginning of December, that's a Congress with an obvious Republican majority, and they absolutely called a halt to the whole process. Here were all these people from the South coming to take the--not loyalty oaths--but the Oath of Office into the U.S. Congress, and they were stopped, some of them physically at the door, and told to go home. And the Republican Party now began to try to wrest control, and they did wrest control of Reconstruction away from Andrew Johnson. And from that day forward you had the beginnings of a growing Titanic constitutional political struggle between president and Congress--they are not of the same party, to say the least--that will result in Andrew Johnson's impeachment.

Now, to the Radicals for a moment. They established what was known as the Joint Committee on Reconstruction. There'd never been such a committee really in American history before that date. This was to be a committee of members of both houses of Congress, but they made no pretence to bipartisanship. It had 15 members, 12 of whom were Republicans and three Democrats. They said thank you very much, we don't need any more. Now, they established this joint committee--it began to meet in January of '66--the purpose of which was to investigate what was going on on the ground in the South, to investigate the necessities and needs of Reconstruction, to

investigate the further needs of the Freedmen's Bureau, and to recommend to Congress what legislation ought be passed to reconstruct the country. They held massive hearings, the largest such Congressional Hearings in American history to that time. They saw 144 witnesses over about two months, including Robert E. Lee himself, who came up from Richmond to testify; testifying essentially under orders, and he still was under House Arrest, he didn't really have a choice. They asked hundreds of questions, but you could boil them down to these. They asked about the treatment of freedmen in the South. And their witnesses were all kinds of people, Union officers, Freedmen's Bureau agents, some white Southerners, for sure, some famous, most not. They asked lots of questions about the levels of loyalty and disloyalty. What were the political attitudes of Southerners? They were really trying to find out "what would white Southerners actually do if we did that?"

Now, this was absolutely crucial because we've long--I wouldn't say assumed--but we've long wondered, and there's a lot of evidence for this, that had the white South in its prostrate state, in its state of destruction and defeat, had they truly been put under an honest-to-God, legitimate, near total occupation, the assumption is, among a lot of scholars, that they (being the white South), would've accepted it, because they didn't have any choice; they had virtually no choice at all. And some of their leadership was already in exile. I think I mentioned the other day about 8 to 10,000 ex-Confederate leaders, mostly military people, had left the country, at least temporarily. Anyway, they're trying to test what Southern attitudes are. Thirdly, they ask lots of questions about the needs of the Freedmen's Bureau, what ought this Bureau do? What about schools? What about food? What about hospitals, et cetera? And then they would ask about the need for troops and the need for enforcement.

Now, you may know from reading Foner by now that the reduction in the Union Armies was overnight, from nearly a million men in arms to a mere 15 to 20,000, by 1866; and a fair portion of those are being sent west to fight Indians. And one of the great deep myths about the melodrama of Reconstruction, or the Lost Cause version of Reconstruction over the years, is that the South was put under this military occupation, "bayonet rule," as it so often was called. About the only time a Union soldier fixed a bayonet, in all the Reconstruction years, was when they put their bayonets on, in part to defend themselves and go after the people who were murdering and massacring black people in Memphis and New Orleans in 1866. The vast majority of Union troops throughout the Reconstruction years, in the South, were simply in garrisoned forts, on the coastlines, occasionally in cities.

The conclusions of this report, the Joint Committee's Report, which was by the way chaired by William Pitt Fessenden of Maine, a moderate Republican senator, but a key figure. He had a lot of prestige. He'd been in the U.S. Senate forever. He was an

old-time Republican but a moderate, who had come to see the verdict of the Civil War, the destruction of slavery and the challenge to make it good. Their conclusions were essentially this, and they actually used this word, that it would be, quote, "madness" to let ex-Confederates run the new Southern state governments; madness was the word used by the Committee's report. Secondly, the Johnson style of leniency toward Reconstruction--and they had various ways of putting this and various conclusions they drew from this--was foolish. And the third and last, but not least, they made a whole series of recommendations for what they called safeguards that would be necessary to guarantee security in the South and the beginnings, at least, of a new political regime in every state.

Now, it is that Republican majority Congress of the winter, spring and summer of 1866, that began to first pass the great legislation of Reconstruction. And if you want to see Reconstruction as this rise and fall requiem--and why not--this is the rise. If Reconstruction was a kind of bright, shining moment, as Du Bois once called it in Black Reconstruction in 1935, this was its moment, 1866 and '67, when the actual system by which the Southern states would be readmitted to the Union was put in place. The first thing they passed was the Civil Rights Act of 1866; passed Congress in April of '66. This was an act of Congress, not a constitutional amendment; therefore it didn't require a two-thirds. It was the first statutory definition in American history of the rights of citizenship. It was potentially a profound change in federal state relations. This Republican Congress and its leadership, at least, was going to do some very new things with American federalism. Now, it had a bunch of flaws. It gave full citizenship to all Americans, regardless of race, creed or color; it said that, the first time ever, in our history. We'd never had a citizenship law. It had never been legally determined who was a U.S. citizen. But citizenship had always implied whiteness, and maleness. It now had at least a definition. The problem in it, of course its flaw, and there would be a flaw and a compromise element in almost everything passed in these years--nothing came out pure, out of these terrible debates over Reconstruction--its great flaw was that it was directed against public but not private acts of discrimination. I might still discriminate against you any way I wish privately, with my business, with my private facility, with my school, with a lot of ways, but in terms of public/civic rights, it at least put in place the beginnings of the idea of citizenship rights.

Secondly, this Congress renewed the Freedman's Bureau. They gave it a new life for another year. And they did this--and the Civil Rights Act, by the way--over the rapid and quick veto of Andrew Johnson. What set in as early as April of 1866 was the Federal Government by veto. Congress would pass a law, whether it's the Civil Rights Act, the renewal of the Freedmen's Bureau, and numerous other things--eventually all four of the Reconstruction Acts in early '67--and Johnson would veto them. Andrew

Johnson, in one and a half years, will issue more presidential vetoes than all American presidents before him put together. Not the way the thing's supposed to work, but it's the way this was working. And then, for six months, the Congress debated--and let's remember, there's still about a one-third of this Congress that are Democrats. I don't know how close I can get you to this, but I'm going to try, at least to Section One. Oh dear. I don't know, can you read that? Good. Because that's the country you live in. Oh, I'm sounding so pretentious today. But you know what? The United States was invented at Philadelphia in 1787, but in many ways--and Americans still don't get this, don't understand it, don't know it--the country you actually live in was invented in 1866, in Washington, D.C. It's the country of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Fourteenth Amendment has five parts. It's the first one, the resounding one, the one authored by John Bingham, a staunch, Christian abolitionist from Ohio, went to a tiny little college called Franklin College. It is that first clause that actually revolutionized, if you want, the revolution. The Fourteenth Amendment was in effect the Republican leadership's response to emancipation. Well of course the Thirteenth Amendment is too, but the Thirteenth Amendment, you'll remember, has a second clause that said "Congress shall pass all appropriate legislation, to enforce it." All right, now how do you enforce the end of slavery? What is the end of slavery going to mean? Or, as you were discussing in sections yesterday, and as Foner's chapter addresses, what did freedom mean?

What the amendment did is it enshrined birthright, and it enshrined at least two things into the Constitution. Even though they're ill-defined at first and we're still fighting over them right now, in probably two-thirds of the courts in the United States, as we speak. And by the way, about two-thirds of everything in an American Case Law Book is a Fourteenth Amendment case--those gigantic, God awful thick case law books, if you ever open one--about two-thirds of everything in there goes through the Fourteenth Amendment. Anyway, it enshrined birthright citizenship, number one; and number two, the beginnings of the idea of equal rights, into the Constitution. It took six months of debate. It was passed finally in June of 1866. These were the new framers; if you want, the new founders.

The first set of challenges they faced, they've settled pretty--not easily--but they pretty much settled in clean and clear language. Those first three challenges were number one, to define citizenship and who holds it. Now, the Civil Rights Act had already begun to do that; this is going to go a little further. Two, they had the problem of repudiating Confederate war debts. What do you do with all those debts that a Confederate state had entailed, toward Great Britain or Spain or France or anyone else? The Federal Government was hereby saying in a Constitutional Amendment that any debt the Confederacy had entailed, to any government, any people, any bank, anybody, anywhere--that the United States Federal Government would never pay

them. But they were also here trying to head off, of course, the demands for compensation for loss of slave property, as a Confederate debt. And three, they had to face the question now that every Reconstruction plan to face--and Lincoln had it in his and Johnson had it and even the Wade-Davis Bill had it--and that is which ex-Confederates are going to get disqualified or disfranchised? How many ex-Confederates? What level of disfranchisement would there be from office holding, or for that matter citizenship rights at all, for ex-Confederates?

These three they settled, but there were three others they did not settle so easily, and they were the extent of the right to vote, for black men. Would this amendment declare the right to vote for black men everywhere, or only in the South, only in ex-Confederate states? The inconvenient and terrible problem on this one, of course, is that the very men writing this bill know that in their own northern states black suffrage is not popular, to say the least, and most northern whites still don't want black men to vote, especially in their own states. The evidence of that was so clear, the State of Connecticut, this state, in 1865, after the war was over, held a special referendum and overwhelmingly voted down the right to vote for black men in Connecticut.

Secondly, they had to settle the extent of civil rights declared equal before the law. How equal? Which rights? Where? That first section of the Fourteenth Amendment ends with the famous language of equal protection of the laws. No one shall be deprived--"no state shall deprive any person of life, liberty or property without due process, nor deny any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the law." And then lastly they faced the vexing problem now--and you may have forgotten all about this, it's easy to forget it--of how to reapportion representation of the so-called slave seats. Those are the extra congressmen that Southern states had been given from the 1790s on, through 1860, because of the three-fifths clause in the Constitution. The estimate is that between 1800 and 1860, the slave states in the South, depending on when you take the snapshot, received from twenty to thirty additional congressmen, in the House, because of the three-fifths clause; because three-fifths of black people were being counted for representation. Now what happens is you're going to count all black people. The estimate was that the Southern states would get an additional eighteen more congressmen. So when these new states come back into the Union they're going to have more congressmen, more power, more clout. What are you going to do with that?

Now, the key players in this--and I want to spin through this as quick as possible--the key players in this were, on the one hand Thaddeus Stevens, as a kind of visionary and radical voice. Stevens would've had this amendment go further than it did, especially in Black Suffrage. Probably its greatest architect--two of them really--were John Bingham of Ohio and Lyman Trumbull of Illinois. They're unsung heroes. I bet you

don't know anything about John Bingham and probably nothing about Lyman Trumbull. They're not famous. They should be. Bingham wrote Section One. Lyman Trumbull wrote the '66 Civil Rights Act. He actually wrote the Thirteenth Amendment, and he will write other parts of the Reconstruction legislation. John Bingham will stand up day after day in the Congress and will argue that Emancipation had finally forced the United States--this is the way he always put it--to apply the Bill of Rights to everybody. And he argued, in his words, that what they were really doing now, were federalizing the Bill of Rights. Now think about it. American history had always had the Bill of Rights. Just tick them off, the first ten Amendments to the Constitution; your right to religion and your right to free speech and your right to assembly, and on and on and on. But it had never been applied to all Americans. There'd never even been an assumption it applied to all Americans. Well, there were others. Charles Sumner, to some extent; Robert Dale Owen of Indiana, the old utopian community leader, was quite a visionary of this as well; and some others. But it's really a handful of six or seven people, who wrote the Fourteenth Amendment.

Now, they faced tremendous opposition. Day in and day out Democrats would get up and say that all the Fourteenth Amendment really was trying to do is to get white and black people to marry each other. They trotted out the worst of white supremacy and the worst of racism to try to trash the vision of the Fourteenth Amendment. It's going to have effect eventually in a larger American politics, rest assured, because the '68 presidential election is going to be a referendum on this, and it will be, without question, the most white supremacist, racist election in all of American history; so unsubtle and so blunt that it will surprise you, I suspect.

The central compromise in the Fourteenth Amendment--I'll let you read the rest of its provisions--but the central compromise was actually on black suffrage. As I said, there was this uncomfortable fact that most white Northerners didn't want black people to vote, in the North. So they left any enforcement of the right to vote to the states. They're going to codify the right to vote for black males--and by the way it's the first time the word male got into the U.S. Constitution--a very complicated, important amendment, and it's going to cause a terrible explosion and actually a bad train wreck between the Women's Suffrage Movement and the old abolition movement, black and white men, and it's going to cause Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony and others to basically bolt from the black suffrage movement, and even the whole Civil Rights movement, such as it was during Reconstruction, and go off and fight their own crusade. That's another long story we'll return to.

So instead of an outright guarantee of the right to vote, everywhere, for blacks, men, the final version left control of suffrage to the states. It did though, in one provision, penalize if a state, to come back into the Union, denied the right to vote to black men,

it would have its representation in Congress reduced to the proportion of the black males in their state. Now that's not going to scare many northern states because they don't have large black populations. And actually they're not going to be part of that provision because they never seceded from the Union. But the key thing here is that the equality genie, this language of equal protection, this definition of citizenship rights, it had never happened before, the equality genie was now out of the bottle, and for better or worse it could never be put back.

The Equal Protection Clause is the most malleable provision in the Constitution. It has been used to support or advance the rights of everyone, and everything, every kind of organization you can imagine, cities, states, corporations, immigrants, women, gays and lesbians, anti-gay and lesbian movements, students, labor unions, anti-labor union movements. It has advanced tolerance and intolerance. It has advanced affirmative action and the anti-affirmative action crusade. The Fourteenth Amendment is so malleable it can be used by anyone. It's the great legal wellspring of the modern Civil Rights Revolution. No Fourteenth Amendment, no Civil Rights Movement. And last but not least, it is the basis of that dreadful Supreme Court decision in 2000 known as Bush v. Gore. I didn't make that up.

Now, in this circumstance, of the passage of the Civil Rights Act, the passage of the new Freedmen's Bureau, the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, now to be sent out to the states for ratification, comes the fall elections of 1866. And Andrew Johnson took his case out on the road. He called it the Swing Around the Circle. The circle was to be the Union or--oh, where's my map? I have a better map here somewhere. Oops, no I don't even really have the whole North on here, sorry about that. Oh well. In the fall elections of 1866--these were Congressional elections but they're terribly important, given what's going on in Congress--the '66 Congressional elections were a referendum on Reconstruction and they came in the wake of two terrible racial riots or massacres in the South, which really got Northern attention. The first was in New Orleans, the other in Memphis. In both cases they were essentially police riots. In Memphis, about forty blacks were killed and over 200 wounded, whole neighborhoods destroyed; Congressional investigations launched. In New Orleans the riots or massacre that was conducted by the white police of New Orleans against its black community was stimulated by a political parade of black Republicans in the late spring, 1866. Before the New Orleans riot was over thirty-four blacks were killed, about 250 wounded, and hundreds of homes destroyed. This was the state of chaos and reaction, already going on in the South. And you don't even really have legitimate functioning governments yet.

So out on the hustings that fall the campaign appeals were on the one hand by Democrats to prejudice and racism and leave the South alone. Democrats are out on

the hustings blaming Republicans for causing that violence in the South--if you give black people the right to vote, if you let black people move too high, too far, too fast, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And the Republicans attacking Andrew Johnson, for everything, including his drunkenness at his inauguration, but most importantly for his insolence and obstinance and obstruction to Reconstruction. So Johnson took his case to the people. He went on a long tour--he called it the Swing Around the Circle--all over the Northern states, up through New England, all across the Midwest, and he tried to be the old stump speaker from East Tennessee, and it totally backfired on him. He demanded that Ulysses Grant go with him; he demanded that William H. Seward go with him, the Secretary of State, and they reluctantly joined him. They were, after all, serving him as president. Grant hated this. Grant didn't even like politics. He's soon going to have to change his tune on that.

But what happened, in essence, is that Andrew Johnson went out and caused a gigantic embarrassment, for himself, for Grant, and for others. He took out hundreds and hundreds of new U.S. flags, that had thirty-six stars on them, and not the twenty-five, without the eleven seceded states, and he would pass out the flags. And everywhere he went he would make the same speech, over and over and over. He would say you always begin by saying, "I stand on the Constitution." And then he started talking about the traitors in Congress, he called them traitors, Stevens and Sumner and Bingham and Fessenden, in their own states. Now that wasn't very clever. He even engaged in all kinds of undignified displays and certain kinds of vulgarity. Crowds began to react to him. He'd give the same damn speech town after town after town after town. It'd be reprinted in the paper and before he could get up and say, "I stand on the Constitution," the crowd would start saying, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, you stand on the Constitution." Crowds started shouting back at him saying, "Shut up" and "Stop" and "We'd rather hear Grant," and chants of that sort. It became, in some instances, by the time he got to the Midwest, into Indiana and Illinois, impossible for him even to hold an audience. Then finally he started to compare himself to Jesus on the cross; never a good idea. [Laughter] He was being crucified by the radical, traitorous wing of the Republican Party and Congress. And then he invented a story that he had been the one called Judas, and he worked that, he worked the Judas metaphor, about as often as he could. He was finally shouted off the stage in Pittsburgh and he just took the train and went home. He also kept referring to this magical circle of the Union; magical circle of the Union, and it became a parody.

And in the fall elections, the people of the Northern states returned an overwhelming majority of Republicans to the Congress; a slightly more than two-thirds veto proof majority, to the Congress. And it will be that Congress, once it convenes in December '66 and into the next winter of '67, that will put in place the first Reconstruction Act, and then three subsequent Reconstruction Acts to enforce the first. And that first

Reconstruction Act we will come back to next time, because it's crucial. But it set up here--and you can see it on this map--a system by which the South was to now be divided into five military districts, two or three states in each, the ex-Confederacy divided into five military districts, each commanded by a major-general. That major-general was to have control over elections and electoral boards, and a sufficient body of troops, it said, to enforce the electoral process in the South. And there was to be, according to that first Reconstruction Act, as we'll see, a high level of Confederate disenfranchisement. This now will be the Republican Party taking control of Reconstruction, of trying to plant the Republican Party into the South now with African-American votes, and they will succeed in creating Republican control, legislatures, governors' offices, in all eleven of the ex-Confederate states--at least at first--and in some of those states we'll see some remarkable experimental democracy put in place, unprecedented, to that time, in American history. Unfortunately, of course, what will also be stimulated and put in place is a deeply embittered reaction in the white South, to now do whatever it took--by any means necessary--to destroy the Republican party, to destroy African-American autonomy, to destroy the African-American right to vote. And it will be organizations like the Ku Klux Klan, which had been around at least since 1866 but are going to explode with fury in 1868. And between 1868 and 1871, the Klan and its many, many, many imitators will engage in a kind of violence-as-real-politics, in an attempt to take back control of the political South. And I'll leave you there hanging, with good will.

[end of transcript]

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Civil War and Reconstruction: Lecture 23 TranscriptApril 15, 2008<< back

Professor David Blight: So what is the engine of history? I beg your attention. There's a simple question for you, what is the engine of history? Don't you like unanswerable questions? Is the engine of history politics, the inherent, natural, eternal quest of people to bend other people's wills and take power? Or is the engine of history economics, the grinding, on-the-ground process by which people carve out livelihoods over against other people's competition for the same livelihoods? It doesn't seem to matter what history you study, or where you look, history always somehow comes around to this nexus, this collision, between forces of political power and forces of economics, and our job is always somehow to discern between them and how they mix. Now often, of course, the answer is that it's all one and the same thing.

Listen to this passage by a freedman in the South named Bailey Wyatt. He got up and made a speech at a freedmen's political meeting. This was actually an early Union League meeting, in 1866. It was about political organizing in the South. But know what Bailey gets up and says, as it was recorded. It was a meeting in Yorktown, Virginia. Bailey Wyatt, former slave, he's sort of announcing the freed people's grievances at a political gathering. He says: "We now as a people desires to be elevated, and we desires to do all we can to be educated, and we hope our friends will aid us all they can. I may state to all our friends and to all our enemies that we has a right to the land where we are located. Why? I'll tell you. Our wives, our children, our husbands, has been sold over and over again to purchase the lands we now locates upon. For that reason we have a divine right to the land. And then didn't we clear the lands and raise the crops of corn and of cotton and of tobacco and of rice and of sugar and of everything? And then didn't them large cities in the North grow up on the cotton and the sugars and the rice that we made? Yes, I appeal to the South and to the North, if I hasn't spoken the words of the truth. I say they have grown rich, and my people are poor." At a political rally, he makes an aggressive economic speech about the labor theory of value. He didn't need to read to John Locke. He'd never read Second Treatise on Government. He hadn't had a political philosophy course, but he absolutely understood. He called it the divine right--the labor theory of value. If I labor to improve that land, it's mine. In that, in the simplicity, in the agony and the beauty of Bailey Wyatt's statement, you have a lot of what was at stake in Reconstruction, and you have a lot about what the political dilemma was, in delivering on Bailey Wyatt's claim to a divine right to the land.

All right, back to Washington, back to the politics, at least for a few minutes, and then I want to shift us south to this story of the on-the-ground economics of Reconstruction, especially this massive transformation of a slave labor economy into some kind of free labor economy that quickly evolves, of course--and you know this, at least the contours of it, from reading Foner--it evolves eventually, rather quickly, into a system of tenant farming and a system of sharecropping and a system ultimately of a kind of debt peonage. But in Washington, the political triumph of the Radical Republicans comes in that veto-proof Congress they produced in the fall elections of 1866. And in 1867 they passed the First Reconstruction Act, followed after that, in '67 and early '68, by three more Reconstruction Acts, simply called the Second, Third, and Fourth Reconstruction Acts. And it was this system by which the southern states, the ex-Confederate states, were actually readmitted to the Union. The great possibilities--Foner addresses over and over--in this experiment in racial democracy, this experiment in increasing democratic forms of government and institutions in the South, through the transplanting of the Republican Party into those ex-Confederate states, is rooted in this document.

Those are the five--I don't know if you can read it in the back, can read that in the back? Yeah, all right, I love this machine, it makes me look good. But those are the five--I'm not going to, well, maybe I will. The first part of the First Reconstruction Act divided the South into five military districts. The Second said that each district would be commanded by a General, not below the rank of Brigadier-General, and an adequate military force. That part will never really come off, and it wasn't even begun. The Third, the Commanding General would supervise--a General would supervise election of delegates to state conventions, and those new state conventions would write these new state constitutions for the Southern states. Note the process now. This is not Lincoln's Ten Percent Plan, and it sure as hell isn't Andrew Johnson's "that portion who are loyal" plan. All adult males, regardless of color, who were not disfranchised for participation in the war, were eligible to vote, and the constitutions had to provide for male Negro suffrage, in the South. You'll note, the Republicans, as I've said before, are stepping clear of black suffrage in the North, and they're going to do it again in the Fifteenth Amendment; we'll come back to that Thursday. And finally, when a majority of the voters ratified a constitution, and when Congress approved it--the President has virtually no role in this, this is Congressional Reconstruction; when a state had ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, no choice, the equal protection clause, the citizenship amendment--you must accept, then and only then, a state would be readmitted to the Union.

If you put it all in one large pill, it's a very big pill for the ex-Confederate states to swallow, and at least politically, on the surface, it is exactly what they had to swallow in order to be readmitted to the Union. And between 1866--actually Tennessee was

readmitted before this act even passed, in a shifty, strange manner; it had to be readmitted again after that--but between '66 and 1870, the eleven former Confederate states were readmitted to the Union under the Radical Reconstruction Plan of the Congressional Republicans. Now, those three subsequent Reconstruction Acts are very important. And by the way, every one of these acts, including the renewal each year of the Freedmen's Bureau, the renewal--I mean, the first Civil Rights Act--fifteen different bills developing a Reconstruction plan, passed by Congress, were all vetoed between 1866 and '68 by Andrew Johnson. I may have said this before, more vetoes by a president of the United States than all previous American presidents put together. You could call this a constitutional crisis; it was. You could call it a breakdown in federalism. You could call it whatever you want. But it's government by veto and override of veto. Every time A.J. vetoed a Reconstruction Act, Congress, in its two-thirds majority, Republicans in both houses, overrode his veto. We've never had a government operate like this, with this many vetoes, an override of vetoes, in such a concentrated period of time. That's how Reconstruction was actually put in place politically.

The Second Reconstruction Act gave details for how those military commanders were supposed to conduct their districts. The Third Reconstruction Act, passed summer of '67, set up what were called registration boards, which were empowered to deny voting rights to anyone they felt were not taking loyalty oaths in good faith; they're still trying to enforce this loyalty oath. And the Fourth Reconstruction Act, not passed until spring of '68, simply said that a majority of votes cast would be sufficient to put a new constitution into effect, not a majority of those Southerners who had voted in 1860. You'll note some erosion there, in the radicalism of the radical plan. There are a lot of reasons for that, not the least of which is they were in the midst, at that point, of trying to impeach Andrew Johnson. Now, I wish I had an entire lecture--well I do have an entire lecture--to give you on the impeachment of Andrew Johnson, but I'm going to do it quickly, and I'd be more than happy in our review session in a couple of weeks, or any other time, to come back to it. It's the first great model we have of the impeachment of a President, of course, in our history. We've had another one, since. We used to think it would never, ever, ever happen again after the Nixon debacle. Here I go, I'm straying into my tangent. Believe it or not I was--I'm giving away my age here--but I was a high school teacher the year Richard Nixon was almost impeached, and I had prepared for months to teach my students about impeachment, and then the SOB resigned. [Laughter] And it just took all the fun out of the early 1970s. [Laughter] But it was a great civics lesson. We got that civics lesson over again because of Bill Clinton's affair with a White House intern, and because of what "is" or "was" or whatever the hell it was he said to the Grand Jury.

You need to know a couple of things though about the Constitution, if you don't already know it. There actually are four, well five, provisions about impeachment in the Constitution. It's the most awesome power in the Constitution, in some ways, and it isn't wielded very often. The authority to impeach, of course, rests with the House of Representatives. It is the House of Representatives, through its judiciary committee, that investigates grounds for impeachment of a president or a cabinet official or a Supreme Court justice. It is the House of Representatives that then brings articles of impeachment, which in effect are like an indictment, although they are a political indictment and never intended to be a legal indictment. The third part of the Constitution, Article 1, Section 3, Clause 6, gives the U.S. Senate the power to sit as the jury, the judicial function of trying a person under impeachment charges. The House charges, the Senate judges. Only the Senate, in its collective vote, can determine guilt or innocence, and it takes--they kept this an awesome power and difficult to use--it takes a two-thirds vote of the U.S. Senate to impeach and remove a president or other official. And then comes the punishment clause, Article 1, Section 3, Clause 7 of the Constitution: judgment in cases of impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any other office of honor, trust, or profit, under the United States, but the party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to indictment, trial, judgment and punishment according to law. You could still be tried in a criminal court after you're impeached, although we've never gotten that far. But the only power the Senate has is removal. And that is exactly what the Radical Republicans are trying to do to Andrew Johnson, and that he provokes them to do, over and over, in 1867 and early 1868. There is one other feature in the Constitution, and that is of course the President's pardon power: the President shall have the power to pardon in all cases, except impeachment. Now, I don't--you don't remember Gerald Ford's pardon of Richard Nixon. I do. Probably cost Gerald Ford election.

All right, in brief, what happened in the Johnson impeachment--and he was impeached, he simply wasn't removed from office--is what you had is a process, through four and five different--depends on how you count them--stages in the political development of this crisis of authority and power over who's going to run Reconstruction. Now there are numerous theories, historical interpretations, about why Johnson was finally impeached by the Republicans. It never would have happened if Andrew Johnson would've, in any way, just backed off and admitted that he was probably going to be a lame duck president. One theory is Johnson's personal behavior, as an explanation for his impeachment. His personal habits were hardly fetching. His Swing Around the Circle in the fall of 1866 was an utter embarrassment to the presidency. His likening himself to Jesus; his constant ranting on the Radical Republicans as traitors, calling them Judas. He is called in the press a "presidential

ass," at various times during that tour. That's one part of it, the sort of personal provocations of his style.

But a second explanation, that I think holds much more weight, is that Johnson and the Radical Republicans simply had fundamentally different constitutional conceptions of the meaning of the war and the meaning and the nature of Reconstruction policy. Johnson, you'll remember, wanted a rapid, quick, presidential, executive Reconstruction, with virtually no alteration of the Constitution and utterly no changes in black civil and political rights. His fifteen vetoes and the overrides of those vetoes--in that process of veto and override, you really have the origins, the roots, the essence of why the Radicals finally decided the best thing in their political interest to do with Andrew Johnson was to remove him. A third theory is--and there's something to this, although I don't think it explains it all by any means--is what one historian has called the radical plot thesis, just sheer partisan politics, just sheer partisan hatreds. This guy was an old Jacksonian Democrat, he was a southern Democrat, as the president, and the Republicans not only wanted him out of the way of their Reconstruction plans, they wanted the Democratic Party ruined, if they could do it. Some of them did want that. Some of the leaders of the impeachment movement in the House--James Ashley, Benjamin Butler, George Boutwell and others--were sometimes referred to, even in their friendly press, as one Republican paper put it, "as baleful a trio of buzzards as ever perched in the House of Representatives." And they were accused, as sometimes politicians are accused today, of a witch-hunt. They investigated everything about Johnson, his bank accounts, allegations that he had tried to betray Tennessee during the Civil War--which were nonsense--and even that he had somehow participated in the Booth conspiracy to kill Lincoln--utter nonsense.

The real explanation here, if there's smoke--I mean if there's fire, where the smoke comes from on this radical plot thesis against Johnson, is this idea that there were some Radical Republicans here who saw a big opening, not only to remake the South, to Yankeeize the South--and they are interested in doing that, and not always of bad motives; the South needed schools, desperately; it needed some kind of economic revival, desperately; it needed its harbors dredged desperately. It needed an activist government to do all of this. But there were some Radical Republicans who saw a chance here to rearrange constitutional powers, to use the feeling abroad against Andrew Johnson, to tip the balance of power toward the Congress, as never before, in the nature of the federal government. Removing Johnson would be removing an obstacle to congressional hegemony over the federal government. And now there's some element here too, of the fact that you need to remember who actually would've replaced Andrew Johnson if he had been removed from office. There is no vice-president. He had been Lincoln's vice-president. There is no vice-president. We didn't have the amendment, which comes later, in the twentieth century, which allows a new

president who takes over to appoint his vice-president. So in the absence of any vice-president, who would've become president? Come on, that's a great trivia question, use this one out at the bar. No one will know it. Louder, I can't hear you.

Students: Speaker of the House.

Professor David Blight: No. President Pro Tem of the Senate--bingo--who was Benjamin Wade, a Radical Republican from Ohio, and one of the leaders of the impeachment movement; a little unsavory. You're organizing to impeach the president; oh by the way, I'll be the next president. And fourth and last, but not least, what's at stake in the impeachment of Andrew Johnson--and I'm going to spare you all the sordid, wonderful, tasty, lovely details of the corruption and skullduggery and scandal and payments that went on, in the final vote in the Senate, that moved seven Republicans over to acquittal and saved A.J.'s hide. I'm going to spare you all that wonderful, lovely, corruption. It's really beautiful, awful, ugly stuff. Money, offices. If you read John Kennedy's Profiles in Courage. We all love to love Jack Kennedy, and Ted Sorenson, who was his speech writer, was one of the greatest speech writers ever, and Ted Sorenson wrote that book, Profiles in Courage, then they put Jack Kennedy's name on it. And one of his chapters is, of course, about Andrew Johnson being persecuted by the Radical Republicans in Reconstruction. Blah, God they got that wrong.

But last, but not least, Andrew Johnson was impeached and the Radicals kept going after him because A.J. wouldn't quit; he kept provoking them, provoking them, provoking them and provoking them, and not just with words. They would appoint a General in one of the five districts in the South, he'd fire him. Congress would appoint a whole new series of Freedman's Bureau agents for Texas, he'd fire them. You can't run a government like that. He would veto the Freedmen's Bureau, they'd override the Freedmen's Bureau and they'd put the budget in place, and he'd say, "Just go and try to enforce it." Now what do you do with a president, if you're running the Congress and you're trying to put a policy in place? But at the heart here was a struggle between a group of politicians capable of serious corruption in their own way, but nevertheless who were actually trying to defeat white supremacy. They were actually really trying to create some kind of black civil and political rights in the South. Sure, they wanted those blacks to be Republican voters; what else is new? But Andrew Johnson stood fast against them at every turn to try to preserve his own particular vision of white supremacy. Note just one passage. In his State of the Union Message, December 1867--this is after three attempts; three investigations of him have already been done by the House Judiciary Committee, and the House Judiciary Committee has brought possible impeachment articles to a vote and yet voted it down because they didn't quite have any smoking guns yet. And what does he do in his State of the Union,

December 1867, among other things? He says: "In the progress of nations,"--I quote--"Negroes have shown less capacity for government than any other race of people. No independent government of any form has ever been successful in their hands. Wherever they have been left to their own devices, they have shown a constant tendency to relapse into barbarism." And it got worse from there.

Stephens, Sumner, Wade and the host of the Republicans in Congress kept hearing this over and over and over, and finally they went after him. The House finally voted in February 1868, by a vote of about 140 to 50-something, to impeach him. The trouble was they actually--they wrote eleven articles of impeachment but in essence the first nine were all about the technical violation of two laws that Congress had passed that ultimately will be, and should have been, declared unconstitutional. They are called the Tenure of Office Act and the Command of the Army Act. The Tenure of Office Act was a law passed in essence saying the President of the United States could not fire members of his own cabinet [laughs]. The Commander of the Army, the Act said, the president of the United States as Commander-in-Chief, cannot issue orders to the armies without passing those orders through the General of the Army; which was the nineteenth century version of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They were literally trying to strip constitutional powers away from--not the presidency--but from Andrew Johnson. He violated the Tenure of Office Act, he violated the Command of the Army Act, he willfully did it, and that's the grounds on which they actually impeached him and put him on trial.

Now, in the end he was acquitted, not just because of skullduggery, corruption, and payments; not entirely because of that at all. He was acquitted, in part, because it was the spring of 1868. The Republican Party was about to hold its nominating convention for the 1868 election, and they were about to nominate, everybody knew it, if they could just convince him to do it, Ulysses Grant as the next presidential candidate. Grant had been Johnson's General of the Army and Johnson kept embarrassing Grant, over and over and over, until Grant resigned. And the Republicans were suddenly frightened politically in the spring of 1868, if they really removed Johnson and put Ben Wade in the presidency and just literally took over the government, that it might really hurt them at the polls, in the fall. And that Democratic Party was doing everything under the sun, including using the Ku Klux Klan to a tremendous extent, as we'll see in the next two weeks, to revive itself and oppose the Republicans in election after election; and will they ever in that '68 election.

In the spring of '68 good old A.J. promised better behavior too. He said he'd cool it, he'd back off, he'd get out of the way, and he would never run again; which wasn't quite true. He was acquitted, he served out his term. He went home to East Tennessee and did as old Andy Johnson always had, he got back on the stump and he got himself

re-elected to the U.S. Senate. He will die in 1875. He's buried in Greenville, Tennessee, to this day, and we're told he was buried with a copy of the Constitution on his chest, held down by his hands. He used to say he stood on the Constitution; he's buried with the Constitution I guess standing on him. Goodbye Andrew Johnson, it's been so good to know you.

Now, that fall the American people had a pivotal presidential election. I know we say that about all great elections, but let me give you the quick and dirty, on 1868. Foner covers this nicely. Grant was a war hero, of course. He was going to be now the candidate of harmony. We've had a lot of generals in our history run for president as candidates of harmony. When informed of his nomination, which was only a few weeks after the acquittal trial, in the Senate, of Andrew Johnson, when informed on May 20, 1868 of his--excuse me, in early June, 1868 of his nomination, he issued a public statement which read: "I shall have no policy of my own to interfere against the will of the people." And I'm going to repeat that, you tell me what it means. "I shall have no policy of my own to interfere against the will of the people." I will not take a stand, he said, in effect. He didn't exactly mean that, but the slogan--and he ended that statement with the famous slogan that would become the slogan of his election campaign, "Let us have peace." This splendidly ambiguous slogan, "Let us have peace." And God knows the whole country's yearning for peace, but what they would have in 1868 is by far the most racist, white supremacist election in American history, and by far, to that date, the most violent. Grant had committed to congressional control of Reconstruction and to the Reconstruction Acts. But the party platform in '68 now retrenched into being a political persuasion of order and stability and no longer of revolution and experiment. They would now be protectors of the status quo they had created, rather than the innovators and the experimenters.

They were now pilloried by their opponents, the Democrats, as radicals, as amalgamationists, as miscegenationists. Black suffrage, the right to vote for black men became the issue of the 1868 election. If you think the Democratic Party in the 1960s under LBJ, which passes the '64 and '65 Civil Rights Act, put itself on a course of near destruction in the South because of its liberal racial views--which it did--the Republicans of 1868 are now running as the party of the black man's right to vote. Now they did say that they were going to leave the right to vote to the whims of the states, in the North, but in the South, in that Reconstruction Act, and by swallowing the Fourteenth Amendment, the black man's right to vote was supposed to be sacrosanct. The Democratic Party had its convention in July of '68. It nominated Horatio Seymour of New York, its former governor. Now Seymour had, among other things--the Democrat's candidate for president--the vice-presidential candidate gets worse--but the Democrat's presidential candidate in '68, Seymour, had openly supported the draft rioters in 1863 in New York City, who were out slaughtering

people in the streets. He was on record for having opposed the Civil War, for having been a Peace Democrat, a McClellan supporter, a man who would've sued for peace with the South, and he chose as his running mate Francis "Frank" Blair, for vice-president, from Missouri, who was not only an open white supremacist, but he declared that the Democrats would, if elected, announce the Reconstruction Acts null and void, they would repeal them, and they would return the South as immediately as possible to home rule. In other words, if the Democrats were elected in '68 they would crush the Reconstruction plans. And Blair, in his blustery ways, even threatened a second civil war; a little stupid there.

There were rhetoric and reality in '68, but what was at stake in '68 were the results of the Civil War. It was a memory-laden peace that was at stake. The Democrats wanted to take the Constitution backward. The New York Herald, a Democratic paper, asked, quote, "Was it the Constitution as it was or the Constitution as it is?" That's Andrew Johnson's slogan. Now I want to just give you an example or two of just how racist this campaign was in 1868. There were bloody shirts waving everywhere. "Your people killed my people." "The blood on your hands is the blood of my son." There were Southern bloody shirts, Northern bloody shirts, Democratic Party bloody shirts, Republican Party bloody shirts, and African-American bloody shirts; symbolically, and in some cases literally, people would hold them up. Here's Blair, the vice-president, the attack dog, on the campaign trail. Republicans had oppressed the South, claimed Blair in one speech, by subjecting it to the rule of a, quote, "semi-barbarous race of blacks who are polygamist and destined to subject white women to their unbridled lust." "Let White Men Rule America," screamed a headline in a Louisville newspaper, arguing that Republicans preferred, quote, "native negroes to native whites." And everywhere Democrats labeled the Republican Party as the party of, quote, "the amalgamation of the races, the monstrous negro equality doctrine," and on and on it went. A Georgia Democrat, who got himself elected to the U.S. Senate, named Benjamin Hill, said the South was now under the rule of a foreign power, driven by hate and determined to dishonor an unarmed people. And in language understood across, you might say, all the white class lines in the South, he announced that if the Radicals controlled Reconstruction, southern whites would become America's new slaves. They were, said Benjamin Hill, quote, "becoming the new negroes." And on and on it went.

Now, the Republicans gave it back, not quite in kind, but they certainly waved their bloody shirts. Here's Wendell Phillips, the old abolitionist in Boston, who said, quote, in this election, "We have just finished a war between two ideas. We sent our armies into South Carolina to carry our ideas. If we had no right to carry our ideas, we had no right to send our armies. If the Democrats"--no, he said, "If Seymour wins this election it is as if Lee triumphs at Appomattox." And that makes it pretty clear. Or

take this example of a kind of a black bloody shirt. This is Benjamin Tanner, the editor of The Christian Recorder, the largest circulation black newspaper in the United States. It was the weekly newspaper of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. And he put it into a kind of little parable. And he says what's at stake in the '68 election--this is very gendered of course--when you think about the power and significance of black male suffrage you know exactly what he's aiming at. He says Negro manhood is what is at stake in '68. Here's the way he put it. "Negro manhood says 'I am an American citizen.' Modern Democracy," meaning the Democratic Party, "says 'you are not.' Negro manhood says 'I demand all my rights, civil and political.' Modern Democracy says 'you have no rights, except what I choose to give you.' Negro manhood says 'I must build churches for myself and schoolhouses for my children.' Modern Democracy says 'if you do, I will burn them down.' Negro manhood says 'I will exercise the rights vouchsafed.' Modern Democracy says 'if you do I will mob and murder you.'" Now, you think our political campaigns get ugly. God, we are so tame, compared to this. As someone once said, politics, it's just war by other means, and there's never a time when that is more true than 1868.

The Ku Klux Klan came into its own in 1868. I'm going to lecture in full about violence and the Klan come next Thursday and next week. But 1868 was their first real coming out. There was a reign of terror in five or six southern states in this election, especially in Louisiana, Georgia, Arkansas, and Tennessee. All across the South, in '67 and especially that election year of '68, as blacks are beginning to evolve into this process of tenant farming and sharecropping, and trying somehow to eke out livings, they went to the polls in extraordinary numbers and risked their lives, and many of them died doing it. There were all kinds of auxiliaries of the Democratic Party that really were the Ku Klux Klan or its imitators. There were more than 200 political murders in the State of Arkansas alone, in this election. The death toll in Georgia was lower, but intimidation at the polls was very effective. In twenty-two Georgia counties, with a total of 9,300 black men listed on the voting rolls, Grant tallied only eighty-seven votes.

Student: Professor Blight, the students of Civil War have suffered long enough. Let my people go!

Professor David Blight: You're free to leave. [Laughter] Nice hair. I hope he doesn't have a gun. [Laughter] At least he could've sung the lyric. Seriously, has that guy left? And the suffering continues. [Laughter] In Louisiana, more than 1000 people died in political violence, in this one election year, almost all of them black, all between April and November 1868. In Louisiana, twenty-one parishes that had previously had a Republican vote in 1867, totaling some 28,000 black voters, only 501 black votes got cast. And these are just some examples of how intimidation worked. Grant carried all

of the North in '68, except three states, if you count Oregon as a northern state. The only northern states that Seymour and the Democrats carried were New Jersey and New York. Seymour won three border states, Delaware, Maryland and Kentucky, and he won only two of the nine reconstructed, ex-Confederate states--eight, excuse me--that were already readmitted by 1868. Grant won in the electoral college 214 to 80.

The important thing is--two things--the Republicans sustained in the fall elections of 1868 a clear veto-proof Congress; two-thirds in the House and four-fifths in the Senate. And without the approximately half million African-American men who voted for Grant in those ex-Confederate states, Grant would never have been elected. It was the first time in American history when the black vote mattered, it counted; and so many of them voted in the face of threats to their lives. Now, on the ground in the South, in the midst of all this politics and violence, which we'll hear more about in time, a new level of--did he say suffering?--went in place. There was a speech made by a former Confederate General at the American Cotton Planters Association meeting in late 1865; December '65 to be exact. And at that meeting-- ironically it isn't exactly clear what he intended-- but at this meeting the former Confederate General, whose name was Robert Richardson, said, quote, "The emancipated slaves own nothing because nothing but freedom has been given to them."

They own nothing because nothing but freedom was given to them. In the absence of slavery what did the freedmen--now think with me--what did the freedmen actually own? They owned their bodies and they owned their labor. The freed people, as a mass of people, at the end of the Civil War now--the jubilee has come but what do they actually have? They lacked physical capital--money, land, to some extent tools--and they lacked to a certain degree human capital, which means education, literacy, and certain kinds of skills. Now a lot of slaves came out of slavery, of course, with enormous skills. Blacks' economic freedom though, like their political freedom, was largely at the mercy of the regime of white society, or of white supremacy itself, however it would survive. And the primary goal of white Southerners, from day one of Reconstruction, all the way through, was to try to sustain what they most needed, what whites most needed, which was a landless, dependent, agricultural labor force that would stay put. They wanted black people to remain, if not slaves in status, landless, dependent and stationary, as agricultural workers.

Put another way, American freedom for American slaves brought no freedom dues. If you learned about indentured servitude in the past, in the eighteenth century, in all the colonies there were always something called freedom dues. When an indenture ended, a former indentured servant got a suit of clothing, a piece of cash, and usually a piece of land. It didn't happen. There were attempts at this; we'll see more about this in the coming two weeks. There was the Freedmen's Bureau efforts to redistribute land, to

some extent. There was Thaddeus Stephens' bill in 1867 which would've--it didn't pass--but it would've called for forty acres and fifty dollars; there was no mention of a mule--forty acres and fifty dollars be given to each freedmen family by the federal government across the South; forty acres. It actually is sometimes referred to as the first reparations bill; didn't pass. There was Frederick Douglass's idea, a little bit later, of a national freedmen's loan agency, a federal loan agency subsidized by the federal government, by taxpayer money, to which freedmen would apply for loans, perhaps three-year loans, five-year loans, low interest loans, to buy land. It's the simplest idea in banking. Didn't happen. What did happen was a fourth effort that became known as the Freedmen's Bank. The Freedmen's Bank was chartered in late 1865. It lasted eight, nine years. It died in 1874 with obligations to approximately 61,000 depositors, all former slaves, or virtually all former slaves, and the bank died on Frederick Douglass's watch as its president, because it could not make good on its payments. It was a good idea, that really wasn't tried. The Freedmen's Bank, by the way, did have some Congressional support, it did have some federal subsidies, but never enough to make a go or make it work. Today we bail out Bear Stearns. In 1874, the federal government and the politics of 1874, as we'll see, just let the Freedmen's Bank die.

Now, let me leave you with this. I have I think a minute or so. We've learned a great deal, I think, from the First and the Second Reconstructions in American history--if we can refer to the Civil Rights Movement as the Second Reconstruction--we've learned a great deal about how political liberty can be achieved: the right to vote, right to hold office, serve on a jury, engage in the political culture, in spite of the hostility and the violence and intimidation. We've learned a great deal about what can be achieved with political liberty, but we've also learned a lot about what is often not achieved in any kind of concomitant economic power. What happens now in the South is a rapid process from slave labor to a whole new set of economic arrangements in the contract realm. What blacks most wanted to get away from, to kill off if they could, was any old system of gang labor. They wanted control over the labor and lives of their women. They wanted out of gang labor. They wanted plots of land of their own. But they faced essentially these three great obstacles. And I'll leave you with this. One is that they had inherited almost nothing from slavery with which to buy land. Two, they lived in an almost non-existent credit market. Long-term loans were simply not available anywhere; and show me a farmer anywhere, in a capitalist economy, who can survive without his bank loans. And three, they face an enormously hostile regime of white supremacy that does not believe black people should have economic independence.

And initially what we see happening is that tenant farming, and then working on halves, or thirds and then halves, and working in a sharecropping system, becomes a compromise. It becomes a compromise because paying wages to former slaves doesn't

work in an economy that is so cash poor. There's no cash to pay anybody with. So blacks actually begin to embrace this idea of being a tenant farmer, because you get your own plot of land, you have some control over your own labor, you plant your seeds, you own your own tools, or you think you do. At the end of the crop season you're going to share half of that crop with the owner of the land and then with the furnishing merchant, this new institution that evolves. But you get to keep half, and you can at least hope that in that half comes something like cash that you can keep. What it really is going to become, however, for most, not all, is a dead end, to some extent a dead end kind of debt peonage. What we do know is this: over the next twenty to thirty years, by about 1890 and certainly by 1900, about fifteen to percent percent of American freedmen, and their sons and daughters, will own their own land. It means about eight percent to eight-five percent did not. I'll leave you there; and suffer on.

[end of transcript]

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Civil War and Reconstruction: Lecture 24 TranscriptApril 17, 2008<< back

Professor David Blight: Frederick Douglass gave a speech in 1875 that gives us a question that we might keep in mind right through the end of the course. Let's call this "Douglass's question." It's a speech he gives in 1875 in Washington, D.C. Note the year--it's 1875, he's anticipating--it's the 4th of July--and he's anticipating the coming year of the U.S. centennial of independence, and he knows it's going to be a big national celebration; and it will be, and I'll say something more on that next week. Philadelphia put on an extraordinary exhibition that nearly one-tenth of the American people visited. But Douglass is anticipating this national centennial, ten years after the Civil War, and he's worried. He said, "The nation"--and I'm quoting him--"would lift to the sky its million voices in one grand centennial hosanna of peace and goodwill to all the white race, from gulf to lakes, and from sea to sea." And as a black citizen, he dreaded the day, he said--listen to his words, it's one of the most racialized speeches Douglass ever gave. He said he dreaded the day when, his words, "this great white race has renewed its vows of patriotism and flowed back into its accustomed channels." He was proud, he said, to be an American, but he was worried. And then he ended with this question. "If war among the whites brought peace and liberty to blacks, what will peace among the whites bring?"

What would peace among the whites bring? It's a way of shaping an overall question, and Douglass did it for us, as to how and why Reconstruction ended up eroding, collapsing if you want, failing as some say--ending. Now one of the things we're going to begin to examine today, and the rest of the course, is this question--sorry to keep putting the outline back up--but we are always, as historians, debating this question of ends. When did Reconstruction end? As we'll see in a moment, many are going to claim it's all over when they pass the Fifteenth Amendment. That's what Horace Greeley said; that's 1870. And then there are those who argue, "Reconstruction now it really ended in 1873," and there are reasons you might argue that; the horrifying Colfax Massacre in Louisiana on Easter Sunday, April 14 th, 1873, the largest domestic murder, collective mass murder in all of American history, until 9/11, and the following Supreme Court decision, based upon the investigation of that massacre; and I'm going to deal with Colfax next Tuesday. Some would argue that really shows us an end of Reconstruction. But all the southern states weren't yet back under the control of the Democratic Party. So there are those who argue, "no, no, no, Reconstruction doesn't really end until you have the full redemption by the Southern Democrats of their state governments," which doesn't occur until the disputed Election of 1876, and its compromise of 1877; and we'll deal with that in a week in a half. But

then there are plenty of others now who argue, no, no, no, Reconstruction never really ended in the nineteenth century. Heather Cox Richardson has a book out now about the story of Reconstruction and its issues moving west in the United States, throughout the rest of the nineteenth century. Steve Prince, one of your teaching assistants, has a chapter in his dissertation entitled The Ends of Reconstruction; he's playing off that irony or that pun of when did it end, did it ever end? Sam Schaffer's going to argue it didn't end until 1912, in his dissertation. I've got another graduate student, Owen Williams, who's writing a dissertation on the Reconstruction Supreme Court, and he's arguing it absolutely ended in 1873. This is the sort of inside baseball that historians love to play. Name your date and then fight over it. We tell the world dates don't matter, and we love to fight over them. I'm probably going to do what I usually do which is leave you with a good deal of ambiguity about that. In some ways Reconstruction has never ended.

Now, think with me for a moment though, back on the ground in the South about this question of the real lives of the freedmen, the transformations to new labor arrangements, this vexing, knotty, chaotic, in some ways terrible process, by which slave labor converted to free labor and ultimately into sharecropping as a system in which approximately eighty percent of all the freedmen found themselves essentially mired in, as early as the late 1860s and surely by the 1870s and throughout the rest of that century. One of the greatest memoirs we have--it's an odd kind of memoir--but one of the greatest memoirs we have by a sharecropper--and I don't know if you've ever read this book in a course, it gets widely taught, often in African-American history courses--is the autobiography of Nate Shaw called All God's Dangers. His real name was Ned Cobb; name was changed, I guess to protect him, in the title. It's an extraordinary series of hundreds of hours of interviews that Ted Rosengarten did with him some 25 years ago now. Ned Cobb lived a very, very long life, into the middle of the twentieth century, but he grew up a sharecropper.

And there are a thousand nuggets of wisdom, or the secrets from his past, as he often calls them, that Ned Cobb/Nate Shaw has to give us. There's this honest section about how he never got an education, and how he resents that he never got an education, and how he resents actually that his father never even sought to help get him an education. "I didn't never get out of the first reader. Got no education to speak of, and another hurt addition to that, weren't no colored schools through here"--and this is central Alabama--"worth no count. You might find a school close to town somewhere that accommodated the colored, and if you did you were doin' well," said Ned. "My daddy, when he had the opportunity, never did send me to school long enough to learn to read. If he sent his children he'd have to supplement the teacher's salary, but if he don't send his children it don't cost him nothin', and there's nothin' said. None of my

brothers and sisters, not one by name, got a good book learning, and all I can do, I can put down on paper some little old figures but I can't add 'em up."

Now, Ned went on to be a land owner. One of the most moving passages in this book comes toward the end when he buys his first mule, when he puts his first stinking, smelly mule in his own stable. It's like a religious experience. Smelling a mule is not exactly my idea of a religious experience, but it was to Ned. But he really is hard on his father. It's an honest, honest illustration of how the sons and daughters of the freedmen--and Ned is the son of a former slave--were inheriting so little. I mentioned the other day that what the freedmen had was some human capital, their skills, their bodies, their labor, their dreams, their religion, their ideas, their self-worth, their dignity, but they had so little physical capital, they owned nothing, and they had no money, no credit, so few ways of getting any physical capital. He goes on and on and on. I won't quote it but he continually refers to what he called his father's "old slavery thoughts." He complains about how his father never learned how to put up any money, never learned to save anything, and that he hadn't learned it very well either. In fact, here's what he says. He said, "My daddy was blindfolded, didn't look to the future, just throwing"--I'm sorry for the direct language here--"just throwing his money in a dead hog's ass and taking shit." Sorry about that, on the video. But Ned Cobb's directness is useful.

It's in the face of those kinds of obstacles, we can tamely call them, but nevertheless thousands upon thousands of freedmen embraced an education and embraced the hope that literacy could bring. And let me focus on that, just briefly at least. Mired in this system of sharecropping, working on halves, giving half their crop to the landowner and half their crop they would keep and hopefully get cash, but then that cash had to be spent down at the furnishing merchant to get seeds and get tools and get food and clothing. Nevertheless, in the face of all of this, one of the things a freedman most wanted was this book learning that Ned Cobb never got. What we know about slave literacy and freedmen's literacy is essentially this. At the end of the Civil War probably five percent, maybe seven percent to eight, of the American slaves were literate. By 1870 that had increased to perhaps twelve to fifteen percent, and that was due, of course, to the freedmen's schools, to the Freedmen's Bureau schools. There were tremendous accomplishments in these Freedmen's Bureau schools. They created over 4000 of them, and there were some 9300 teachers at one time or another employed in Freedmen's Bureau schools, up into the 1870s. They had at one point slightly more than a quarter million students in these schools, freedmen, young and old; sixty-eight, seventy-two year-old former slaves would sit down in the same room with eight year-olds and begin to try to read out of the same reader.

And there were in some ways nothing more threatening, to white Southerners--actually there were two things most threatening to white Southerners, around which this Southern counter-revolution will be forged. One was the black school, black literacy, education, the potential of mobility, and the education particularly of a black political leadership class. And then on the other hand, directly related, of course, was the creation of black politics itself. As we'll see in a moment, one of the major targets of the Ku Klux Klan, the Knights of the White Camellia, and all the other groups that imitated these, were black schools. Dozens and dozens of black schools were burned to the ground by the Klan between 1868 and the middle of the 1870s.

I want to just read just one little example of what these schools meant to people. I love this little letter because of the assumption, let's call it audacity of hope if you want--forgive the title. This comes from a black school principal whose name was P.B. Randolph. He's running a Freedman's school in New Orleans, in 1866. They named it for William Lloyd Garrison, it's called the Garrison School. He has 373 pupils and he has seven teachers, five of them black, two of them white. And this was the revolution, the potential revolution of Reconstruction. And he writes this letter to himself, William Lloyd Garrison, asking for Garrison to help them get what they need. Just a small excerpt of it. "We are proud of our pupils and feel you will rejoice with us. We feel also that you will not take amiss if we ask a little assistance from Boston in the shape of apparatus to illustrate astronomy, a gyroscope and a microscope, a numerical frame, conic sections, cube root blocks, a magnet, and such other instruments as will enable us to fight this battle for our race against ignorance." Send us the simplest implements to teach some science. There are thousands of those such letters all over the record. Literacy among blacks increased to over eighty percent by 1880--I'm sorry, over twenty percent by 1880--and probably twenty-five to thirty percent-- these things are very difficult to measure--by the turn of the twentieth century. Now you need to know one other thing here. By the 1880s, 1890s, turn of the twentieth century, literacy rates among southern whites were not that much higher.

Now remember one thing above all else about these new economic, social arrangements taking hold from 1866 right on through the 1870s in the South. Sharecropping emerged--this is the argument--sharecropping emerged essentially as a kind of compromise result of a tug-of-war between two kinds of interests. Blacks wanted autonomy. They wanted out of gangs. They wanted their women out of the field. They wanted some control over their economic lives. White folks, the owners, land owners, wanted labor control, a stationary, dependent, poor labor force. Both sides end up embracing tenant farming, sharecropping, because it was such a desperately cash poor society. Land owners didn't want to rent to blacks because they knew in the long run blacks wouldn't get enough cash to pay the rent. Blacks realized quickly they couldn't depend on cash because there wasn't enough. They therefore

themselves began to resist wages, because they'd get promised wages and then they wouldn't get paid. So sharecropping, this system that ultimately becomes a Faustian bargain and a dead end and a kind of tragic no exit for the vast majority, was nevertheless something they actually negotiated and embraced themselves.

Now, also on the ground, in the South, emerging, out of Radical Reconstruction, as the Southern states were put under the First Reconstruction Act and the subsequent Reconstruction Acts, what took place in the South was the creation of new state governments run by the Republican Party in every former Confederate state, at least at first. All the ex-Confederate states were readmitted to the Union between 1868 and 1870; Georgia was the last. But by 1870 all eleven ex-Confederate states are back in the Union. But they're back in the Union, remember, under that Radical Reconstruction Plan. Now the story that set in about this, over the years, from the Lost Cause ideology of the late nineteenth century to the writings of the so-called Dunning School at the turn of the twentieth century and early twentieth century, based on the writings of William H. Dunning and his many, many students he trained at Columbia University, was this idea that what happened in the South now was essentially carpetbag rule, or rule by bayonet, or rule by blacks. Now in the history books we've come to call this, for decades, the myth of carpetbag rule, this idea that the South was colonized, taken over by Northerners who moved south, white Northerners who moved south, applying, appealing to, exploiting and manipulating the black vote to take over the South, to disfranchise and eliminate white Southerners from their own polity.

Now this much is true: In every former Confederate state the so-called radical constitutions did manage to create all sorts of new levels, if you like, of democracy, small-"d". The number of elective offices increased. There was more direct election, more direct control for people than the South had ever seen. There were more people voting, more constituencies, and more people holding office, as we'll see in a second. There was more home rule for local governments than they'd ever experienced before. These new radical constitutions, yes indeed, had eventually a fair degree of corruption. This was the age of spoils and the kinds of corruption going on in southern state governments was no different than the kinds of corruption going on in many other places in the country. But there were many social provisions in these new constitutions, as long as they lasted. And they lasted seven, eight and nine years, in some ex-Confederate states, and they only lasted two, three, and four years in others. For the first time there were social provisions. They not only did away with the Black Codes but they established a certain degree of equal civil rights. Some of these new state governments actually passed Civil Rights Acts. Many of the constitutions made it the state's responsibility now to--for the first time in Southern history; and for that matter there wasn't much of this in the North either--to provide for the sick, the

insane, the disabled, the poverty stricken. And above all else they created public schools, the first public schools the South had ever seen. South Carolina had the first comprehensive school law of any southern state, passed in 1870. By 1871 they had thirty-two percent of people of school age attending some 1700 public schools, in South Carolina--blacks and whites. And by 1875 the South Carolina public school system, created by the Radical Republican regime, had fifty percent--this is still a rural society and a society ridden with problems of race and violence, as we'll see--by 1875 they had fifty percent of the school age population of South Carolina in school, with over 3000 teachers paid by public tax money.

Now, the one thing, of course, that virtually no southern, Radical Republican, southern regime ever accomplished was much in the way of any kind of economic redistribution, of land redistribution. This is our classic problem of Reconstruction. How could you advance political liberty, the right to vote, to hold office, serve on juries, run legislatures, and yet why does economic liberty always, always, always lag behind? Now, there were some attempts, however. Let me give you just one little example. I don't think Foner really even mentions this. Again, South Carolina, which had a black majority of its legislature for about five years during Reconstruction--this was political revolution, and you can see why white Southerners were organizing against it--but the South Carolina Legislature, run by blacks, by blacks and white Republicans, some of them native born Southerners, some of them from the North, created a South Carolina Land Commission. They created it in 1868. It actually is going to last all the way to 1890, on the books. It settled some 5000 South Carolina families, black and white, on land that the state purchased, or took over--confiscated--in effect, and then began to sell to its own citizens on long-term loans, at very reduced interest rates. Approximately $225,000 out of $802,000 eventually could not be accounted for. There was some fraud and corruption in this South Carolina Land Commission. About a quarter of the money that they actually distributed never was accounted for. But it's extremely important to note here that at least an attempt was made. Here was at least the possibility of Radical Reconstruction. By 1876 that Land Commission in South Carolina--by '76 Republicans still barely controlled the South Carolina state government, they're about to lose it that year--by 1876 about 14,000 families had participated, a total of about 70,000 people, about sixty percent black and forty percent white, in actually buying land. By 1884 more blacks were losing land in South Carolina, however, than were buying it. I'll give you one last little number to show at least what the possibilities had been. In the Census of 1890 about 13,000 blacks in South Carolina owned a farm of some size, 4,000 of whom had purchased them through that Land Commission.

Now, we are always talking about the possibilities, the experiments of Reconstruction--"what if," "what if," "what if?" What if there'd been more

enforcement? What if there'd been more military occupation? What if the Klan and its imitators had truly been crushed--altogether crushed? This kind of land commission is one example, among others, of the kinds of efforts that could have flourished. Now, in those state governments in the South, you had for the first time in American history, and in a kind of a explosion of political activity, you had black elected officials; approximately 200 African-Americans in the Southern states served in state legislatures, in state government and executive positions, and ultimately in the U.S. Congress. Sixteen African-Americans from ex-Confederate states were elected to the U.S. Congress, two to the U.S. Senate--Hiram Revels from Mississippi being the first black senator in American history. And how many times do you hear in our political culture today, "the first black since Reconstruction; the first this since Reconstruction; the first that--." The first black governor since Reconstruction was Doug Wilder, in Virginia. The first this and the first that, since Reconstruction. It's because there was this explosion of black political activity, for a short period of time, a decade really, until the lights went out. Of the 1000 delegates to Constitutional writing conventions, in 1868, '69, when these new state governments were created, of about the 1000 delegates that participated in writing those new Constitutions, 268 of them were black. About 680 African-Americans served in the lower houses of state governments during Reconstruction. Four presided as speakers of those houses. There were 112 African-Americans who served in State Senates during Reconstruction. There were at least 41 black sheriffs, somewhere in one of the eleven ex-Confederate states. There were five black mayors of Southern cities, for awhile. There were 145 blacks who served on city councils, and so on and so on.

Now this is the heart of the myth of carpetbag rule. The claim against these people, in the South at least, in the white South, was always they were not prepared, they were ignorant, all they did is sit around eating chicken bones and spitting into gold spittoons that they bought with public money. And if you've ever seen Birth of a Nation, D.W. Griffith's white supremacist epic of 1915, he plays out that scene at great length of the black politicians in state legislatures with their boots up on tables, literally chewing on chicken bones and spitting into spittoons and laughing and playing happy darkie, until the cows come home. Now there were corrupt black politicians and there were corrupt white politicians. I don't really have time to go into all the great biographical stories of the Robert Smalls' and the John Roy--the Robert Smalls' of South Carolina and the John Roy Lynch's of Mississippi, and so many others, many of whom were former slaves, although some of them had been free before the war, by their own purchase, by manumission, by other means. Some of them, only a small percentage, were northern-born blacks who moved south, like Hiram Revels, and eventually got himself elected to the Senate. By the way, just recently--well I guess it was about eight years ago--when the Republicans had control of the Senate they put up a portrait, for the first time, of Hiram Revels; our modern

Republican Party wanted to claim him. He was a Republican; so were they, by name. But anyway there is now today a portrait of Hiram Revels. It took a century, more, to get it there, but he's finally up in the U.S. Senate, his picture.

Now the other side of this myth of carpetbag rule--and I want to be a little speedy about this, but it's also very important--again, the story, the deep myth that set into American culture for generations is that all these Reconstruction governments really were a bunch of Yankees who came south, got themselves elected with black votes and ran these governments and oppressed white Southerners. So who were these carpetbaggers, so called? The term got into our language, and now today anybody who grows up in one state but somehow moves to another and tries to get elected, as Hilary Clinton did in New York, and there are plenty of other examples, is labeled a carpetbagger, at least for ten years or so, until she's lived there long enough and gets reelected and I guess--I guess you got to get reelected before you're no longer a carpetbagger. Well, many of these Northerners who went south were former Union soldiers. Most of them went before 1867 and '68, before these Radical Republican regimes were put in place. They went to become farmers. They went because the land was so cheap. And some of them went because they liked the climate. There were New Hampshirites who went to Mississippi because it was warm. Some carpetbaggers were industrialists and investors. They saw the South now as the place to invest. It obviously was. It was prostrate, and it needed money. Some were federal agents, Freedmen's Bureau agents who stayed and lived there. Many were teachers, some who stayed and lived, if they survived and weren't killed. Some were political opportunists and some were adventurers and n'er-do-wells.

And I'll never forget, as long as I live, one of the best friends I have in the world is a Methodist minister in Chicago who grew up in Mississippi and East Texas, Gene Winkler, and a positively--he's one of the best read human beings I've ever known. He reads more about the Civil War than I do. I used to actually ask him what I should be reading. His real job is being a minister but he spent most of his time reading. And he was one of the most politically radical people I've ever known. He was still trying to be a socialist during Reaganism. But one day I asked Gene, "Gene, why do you keep that picture of Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee in the corner of your office?" He said, "You know, I'm not exactly sure. It's probably because carpetbaggers killed my great-granddaddy." [Laughter] I don't think he said god-damn carpetbaggers; he's a good Methodist. "Carpetbaggers killed my great-granddaddy." I said, "Oh, oh okay." [Laughter] Like so many Southerners, he was a complicated mixture of memories and--well enough on Gene. I actually got the thrill some years ago to write an essay, epilogue to Fitz Brundage's book of essays called Where These Memories Grow, about southern memory, and I opened the piece with that very story, and I was always

worried about how Gene was going to interpret it. And he, thank God, liked it, I think. Anyway.

At no time did carpetbaggers ever make up anywhere near a majority of any southern legislature in the ex-Confederate states. Their goals tended to be financial, economic, and to some extent political. And then there's this other kind of Southerner, the white indigenous Southerner, the native born white Southerner, known to history, of course, as Scalawags, who joined the Republican Party, who became part of these Reconstruction regimes, who said give up the past, give up the old cause, and they often became the object of the ire and the hatred and the violence of white vigilante groups, as readily as anyone else. Now what was a Scalawag? Let me tell you the ways. Hold on, sorry, forgive me, got it. So a Scalwag is, by the way, a runty little horse--that's actually what it means if you look it up--it's a runty little horse, a kind of useless little horse that doesn't work very well for you, just gets in the way, stinks and smells and doesn't pay his way. "Our Scalawag is the local leper of the community," wrote a Tuscaloosa, Alabama newspaper editor in 1869. "Unlike the carpetbagger he is native, which is so much the worse. Once he was respected in his circle, his head was level, and he would look his neighbor in the face. Now, possessed of the itch of office and the sought room of radicalism, he is a mangy dog, slinking through the alleys, haunting the governor's office, defiling with tobacco juice the steps of the capitol, stretching his lazy carcass in the sun on the square or the benches of the mayor's court." That's relatively direct. Scalwags were considered, in other words, turncoats.

Now, they had a variety of social backgrounds. Some were sort of former nobodies but most of them were actually quite prominent people, like the wartime Confederate Governor of Georgia, Joseph E. Brown, who said "give up the cause," and joined the Republican Party after the war. Perhaps most famous of all, James Longstreet, Lee's second in command in the last two years of the war, Longstreet of Georgia, moved out to Louisiana after the war, embraced the Republican Party, said the war had settled something and Southerners had to face it. And he became a railroad president. And he even for awhile commanded U.S. troops in Louisiana who tried to kill off the Klan. There are many, many other examples. There's James Settle of North Carolina. He's one of my favorites. These were fascinating people, courageous people. Settle of North Carolina had been a member of the Confederate Congress. He'd been a big player in Confederate politics in North Carolina, but after the war he said this. "The war had brought a general breaking up," he said, "of old ideas. Taking a new start in the world we are, if we are ever to have prosperity." And then he concluded, "I tell you, Yankees and Yankee notions are just what we want in this country now. We want their capital to build factories and workshops and railroads. We want their intelligence, their energy and enterprise to operate factories and to teach us how to do

it." Settle nearly was killed for his views, his actions; his political actions in particular. There are many other examples. Amos T. Akerman in Georgia, among others--look up him in Foner if you like. Now I guess the only other thing I want to say about that is there were carpetbag governors. There were northern born Republicans who ended up governors of southern states, several of them. There were northern born members of southern state legislatures, some black, some white, and they became, in many instances, the most ready targets of what was to come.

Now, I don't now how well you can see this painting, I'll try to blow it up. It doesn't have a date on it, unfortunately. I need to figure that out. It is entitled "Disfranchisement," which is an interesting title. If you can see on the right, you can see about every kind of image of a bitter, angry, hate in the eyes, Southerner, some sitting on the cannon, others in Ku Klux Klan robes and masks, all of them, of course, looking at the lone black freedman, who on your first look almost looks like he's holding a machete, but he's not, he's holding a voting roll. Now, the southern white counter-revolution, the move towards southern redemption, which simply means, of course, the southern Democratic Party taking back control of their states, between 1870 and 1876, is rooted in their hatred, their resentment of the rise of black political and economic independence.

Now, but first of all, go with me back to Washington, and then we'll end, at least today, back on the ground in the South and try to understand where some of this violence is coming from. The Fifteenth Amendment passed Congress, the Fifteenth now, passed Congress in the spring, late spring, of 1869. It's right after Ulysses S. Grant is inaugurated president. He's elected in the fall, inaugurated in the spring. By 1868, eleven of the twenty-one northern states still denied the right to vote to blacks. You'll remember, Republicans are stepping around this question of black suffrage in the North, but they want to plant it into the South. But the trick was, what kind of amendment would it be? This is the great Voting Rights Amendment. They went through three versions of the Fifteenth Amendment--look this up in Foner, make sure you understand it--they went through three versions in the debate in Congress as to what kind of voting rights amendment to put in the Constitution. The first version--and they went from most conservative to most radical--the first version forbade states the right to deny suffrage on grounds of race, color or previous condition of servitude; that's all it said. That's the most conservative version. The second version would've forbade states to impose literacy, property or nativity qualifications; in other words, that whole array of qualifications tests that will ultimately be used, all over the South, to prevent black folk from voting; and to some extent poor white folk. And then there was a third version which simply would've affirmed simply that all male citizens twenty-one years of age and older had the right to vote, period.

Now, they debated and debated but the one they passed, of course, was the first one, the most conservative, the one that made absolutely no mention of the possibility of qualifications tests. And so the Fifteenth Amendment has two kinds of impact, two great importances if you want. One is that it was passed at all, and it's hugely important, but the other, of course, is it was a very conservative compromise amendment that left the door open to all kinds of machinations, over time, in states, at the local level, about qualifications to vote. It passed the House of Representatives in March, 1869. It finally was ratified by two-thirds of the state legislatures in the United States, a full year later, in the spring of 1870. And many people now looked at the situation in the country, a year into Grant's presidency, the man, the Republican, who said, "Let us have peace." You've got the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery. You got the Fourteenth Amendment establishing citizenship rights and equal protection before the law; at least the beginnings of this fledgling thing called civil rights. You got the Reconstruction Acts in place. Southern states have all been brought back into the Union, by 1870--only Georgia was still being sort of weirdly adjudicated, but it finally was brought back in, in 1870. And now comes the Voting Rights Act. And throughout the history of modern political philosophy and modern political history, the idea was that the vote was the essence of democracy. And so once you've given people the vote, on some level what else could you possibly do? Republicans themselves now say, to themselves, that they have established the principle-- oh, would that they had--of guaranteed rights, and that they could go no further. One Republican wrote to another, after voting for this, he said, "This is," quote, "the last great point that remains to be settled from the issues of the war." And Horace Greeley famously, in his New York Herald Tribune, in April 1870, after the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, said, quote, "Let us have done with Reconstruction"--it was the opening line under a big headline--"Let us have done with Reconstruction. The country is tired and sick of it. Let us have peace." "It's over, it's done," said official Republican Party people to themselves. And of course the white South, for two years already, through its rising and growing Democratic Party and its violent militant wings, is saying, "You bet Reconstruction is over. Let us show you the ways."

Now, I'm actually going to save the violent story for an entire lecture on its own; the Klan, its many actions, examples, through the Colfax Massacre, at least, of 1873, for next Tuesday. But let me leave you with this. What happens now, what is already happening now, in the first Grant administration, by 1870, is what we might simply call--it's the waning of Radicalism, it's the waning of that civic vision, as Foner calls it in your book, of the Radical Republicans' ideology. And what was that vision? Foner lays it all out for you. He said the Radical Republicans had an essential ideological vision. On the one hand it was Unionism. On the other hand it was rooted, to some extent, in trying to create racial equality, because the war had necessitated, it had

forced it on them. They, therefore, were believers in this idea of guaranteed rights within the Constitution. And last but not least they were believers in positive activist central government. And you put those three or four principles together and you've got the package that was the civic vision of the Radical Republicans. But the problem is that vision is now going to crumble as fast, almost as fast, as it ever came into existence; in fact, it's going to crumble faster than it ever came into existence. Oh I'll leave you with this. It's not just going to crumble because Republicans sort of give up the game, and it's not going to just crumble because Thaddeus Stephens dies and Charles Sumner's out of the way, and Radicals don't really run this party under Grant anymore. It's going to crumble because of the most widespread use of political violence in American history.

We'll return to this question next Tuesday, but let me leave you with this. There is no African-American writer, and some white writers, worth their salt, from the 1870s and '80s, right on through well into the twentieth century, who could ever avert their eyes from this story. This is a passage from James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. If you've ever read that wonderful 1912 novel, you'll know it's the story of a black man who's passing for white, but because he's passing in the South he gets to see things that people don't know he's seeing. And of course the book ends, as so many books did in this time, with a lynching. This is Ex-Colored man--he doesn't have any other name--describing what he sees. "A railroad tie was sunk into the ground. The rope was removed and a chain brought and securely coiled around the victim and the stake. There he stood, a man only in form and stature. His eyes were full and vacant, indicating not a single ray of thought. Fuel was brought from everywhere; oil, the torch, the flames crouched for an instant as though to gather strength, then leaped up as high as the victim's head. He squirmed, he writhed, he strained at his chains, then gave out cries and groans that I shall always hear. His eyes, bulging from their sockets, rolled from side to side, appealing in vain for help. I was fixed to the spot where I stood, powerless to take my eyes from what I did not want to see." We have never wanted to see what really happened in the South, in the 1870s, but we'll try.

[end of transcript]

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Civil War and Reconstruction: Lecture 25 TranscriptApril 22, 2008<< back

Professor David Blight: The last book you're reading in this course is by a great journalist, Nick Lemann. It's called Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War. There seems to be a contest right now in writing about and publishing about the violence of Reconstruction. It's really been discovered by American publishers and certainly by American writers. There are no less than three new books out on either the Colfax Massacre, which we'll talk about in a minute, or what Lemann does mostly in his book, which is the story of Mississippi--sometimes called the Shotgun Policy, sometimes called the Mississippi Plan--but, in effect, a coup d'état whereby the white Democrats of Mississippi took back control of that state, largely by terrorist violence, political violence, in 1875. The titles of these books strike me. Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War. Charles Lane's book, a good journalistic popular writer, a whole book on the Colfax Massacre entitled The Day Freedom Died--one day. And there's another book by a young, New York private high school teacher, proof that good books can be written by anyone, The Colfax Massacre: The Untold Story of Black Power, White Terror and the Death of Reconstruction. Now all those titles are true. It's not the redemption, of course, that you hear about in Bob Marley's Redemption Song, but I might recommend that you put Marley on while you're reading about this stuff. It might be a nice antidote. No, I'm not going to sing it.

But I am going to start with a very brief little poem, one of the best illustrations in poetry I know of, of this idea that revolutions can go backward, that revolutions usually do go backwards, for awhile, that revolutions always cause counter-revolutions. It's a poem by Langston Hughes. He wrote it right near the end of his life, in 1965-- note the date. He entitled it "Emancipation," and then a subtitle: "Long View Negro." Two simple verses: "Emancipation, 1865, sighted through the telescope of dreams, looms larger, so much larger, so it seems, than truth can be. But turn the telescope around, look through the larger end, and wonder why, what was so large becomes so small again." The metaphor is powerful, if vexing. Look through the opposite end of a telescope. Look back at history and not forward, and wonder why what was such a dream, what was so large, can become so small again.

Now, when that Fifteenth Amendment passed, that I talked about briefly the other day, there were just amazing celebrations, when it was finally ratified, in 1870, all over the place. I'll only cite a couple. Grant in his Message to Congress in effect said Reconstruction was now largely over. Frederick Douglass, though he wasn't thrilled with the fact that it was the most conservative version of the Fifteenth Amendment

and so on, nevertheless said, "We can now breathe a new atmosphere; we have a new earth beneath and a new sky above." That's a dream. One Republican newspaper called it the nation's second birth; second founding. And Wendell Phillips, again the Massachusetts abolitionist, said it was now the real birthday of the nation because now the Declaration of Independence applied to all. Now, that was placing a great deal of hope in a somewhat limited amendment, to say the least.

That's 1870. Now go ahead just five years with me. This is the period now of Southern redemption, defined of course as the Southern white Democratic Party's counter-revolution in taking back control of its state governments. Happens very quickly in some Southern states. Some are redeemed as early as 1870 by the Democrats and the last three or so not until 1876/77. But think of what you just heard there, that almost unfathomable hope, rooted in this Voting Rights Amendment, and then listen to this statement from the floor of Congress by one of the most brilliant young black politicians who got himself elected-- among those hundreds who got elected, among the sixteen who got elected to Congress-- John Roy Lynch, a former slave, self-taught, he educated himself; like Frederick Douglass there's mysteries about the brilliance of this guy. But he's elected to Congress when he's twenty-six, from Mississippi, under Mississippi's Radical Reconstruction government, so long as it lasted. He's still there in 1875, and on the floor of the Congress-- which was then, as you'll see in a moment, after the '74 Election, now ruled by a majority of Democrats-- he looks them in the eye and he says, "Think of it for a moment, my colleagues. When I leave my home in Mississippi to come to the capital of the nation to take part in the deliberations of this House, and to participate with you in making laws for the government of this great republic, I am treated, not as an American citizen, but as a brute, forced to occupy a filthy smoking car, both night and day, with drunkards, gamblers and criminals, and for what? Not that I am unable or unwilling to pay my way, not that I am obnoxious in my personal appearance or disrespectful in my conduct, but simply because I happen to be of a darker complexion." Now here's the irony and the point. The majority of those men he was speaking to that day in the Congress, in their minds, when they heard him, to the extent they listened when he said that, I think we can safely assume were thinking, "yeah, that's just exactly the way you should be treated."

Now, to 1873 for the moment. The day freedom died, according to Charles Lane's book, is the day of the Colfax Massacre. That day--I wouldn't quite say freedom died on one day, that's a little ahistorical, but so be it; that's probably a publisher's title more than an author's title. But April 14, 1873 is in some ways one of those days we could call in American history a day of infamy. The Supreme Court that day-- at least it's the date of the decision, even though it was Easter Sunday-- handed down its decision, five to four, in the Slaughterhouse Cases, so-called, a collection of five cases

that came out of Louisiana, which was the court's first major ruling on the Civil War Amendments, on the meaning of the Thirteenth, the Fourteenth and in effect the Fifteenth Amendments. That day, the same day, Easter Sunday, in Colfax, Louisiana--a town, not very big, named for Schuyler Colfax, the Vice-President of the United States in the Grant Administration--in Grant Parish--renamed by the Republican regime for Ulysses Grant--the largest mass murder of Americans ever in American history occurred, in the political violence stemming from the divided election in Louisiana, back in the fall of 1872. Now 9/11 of course killed more Americans. We can get caught up in categories of what is domestic violence and foreign violence and so forth, but this is the largest mass murder of Americans in our history, so far as we can tell. That divided election produced in effect two competing governments in Louisiana: the Republican regime which did win the election, for all practical purposes, in spite of the tremendous political violence committed against particularly black voters in that fall '72 election; but a so-called Fusion ticket of basically a kind of white supremacist coalition also claimed to be the legitimate government of Louisiana. And in this situation of essentially an ongoing vigilante war, throughout many of the parishes, counties, of Louisiana, a standoff took place in Colfax. I'll come back to that in a moment.

But back to the Slaughterhouse Case that came down that day. It was, in the end, a testing of the Privileges and Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. In 1869 the City of New Orleans, under its Republican state government, created a corporation to move the slaughterhouse of New Orleans--there actually had never been a legitimate slaughterhouse in New Orleans. What the butchers of New Orleans would do, the white butchers of New Orleans would do, is they'd herd the hogs through the streets of New Orleans and basically they'd butcher the things wherever they wanted to, and they always threw all the--this gets ugly--all of the offal from the hogs into the Mississippi River, up river from the city, before the river reached the main water pipeline into the city. This had long been a problem, long been a series of complaints. And so this was an attempt at clean government and clean cities. The city, and the state backing it up, created a corporation that created a new slaughterhouse. They moved it across the Mississippi River and downstream from the city, for health reasons. They put in a state-appointed inspector, and the white butchers of New Orleans were angry. Some butchers and some critics charged this was a monopoly and an unfair practice. Twenty-five butchers brought suit, with support from the reviving Democratic Party-- white butchers. The lower courts in this particular suit found in favor of the new corporation. It was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. It got on the docket in '72. It was decided April 14, 1873. It was a five-to-four decision. Seemingly on the surface, when you read it-- it's like many court decisions, it's a bit boring at first; five cases from butchers and so on and so on, and you wonder what the hell's this about? Then you keep reading and you realize it became a fundamental decision.

Justice Samuel Miller, for the majority, argued that the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments were intended-- this was the good part of the decision--to end slavery and advance the rights of the freedmen. But he made a sharp--in other words, not to protect a bunch of white butchers in New Orleans. And by the way, the lead lawyer, for the butchers, in the Slaughterhouse Cases, was none other than a man named John A. Campbell, a Georgia-born, former member of the Supreme Court. He had been part of the six-man majority in the Dred Scott decision of 1857; resigned his position in the U.S. Supreme Court in 1861 to go home and fight for the Confederacy. He didn't fight on the battlefield; he became Assistant Secretary of State in the Confederacy and served in that position, and other high-ranking official positions, in the Confederate national government throughout the Civil War. And when the war was over he was one of those high-ranking Confederate officials denied the right to vote, disfranchised for up to four years. He was part of the final set of amnesty and pardons that Andrew Johnson enacted just before leaving office in the spring of '69. And Campbell had made it his business, as a Redeemer now, in the South, to thwart and fight Reconstruction at every turn. He hated black suffrage. He hated black people. He was a virulent white supremacist. He took this case on because he wanted to crush Reconstruction. He even argued, by the way, in the Slaughterhouse Cases-- which Miller turned right back on his head--he even argued that the rights of the butchers were being violated under the Thirteenth Amendment. He said that these butchers were now being forced into a form of involuntary servitude because they had to take their hogs across the Mississippi and slaughter then downriver. It was violating their right to make a proper livelihood by their own individual choice. And frankly, folks--I read this decision this morning; well I got through most of it--if you want to read the origins of our modern day uses, and some would say misuses, of civil rights language and legislation, in our own time, the ways in which some American politicians, lawyers, judges, etcetera, pundits, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, have appropriated the language of the modern Civil Rights movement--especially the language of the "content of our character"--to sometimes some scurrilous ends, the roots of that are in John Campbell's arguments in the Slaughterhouse Cases in 1873.

Miller threw the Thirteenth Amendment argument back at Thompson [ph?] and told him, in effect, to--well--stick it somewhere. Now, however, back to Miller's opinion, in a five-to-four case, the real importance of the Slaughterhouse Case is that even though Miller argued that the purpose of these amendments were to advance black freedom and the rights of the freedman, he nevertheless made a clear distinction between national and state citizenship. In these years we don't even think of--well, I don't think we think in terms today of our state citizen-- do you think of yourself as a citizen of the State of Virginia? Maybe you do, I don't know. Maybe today in Pennsylvania, where people are voting in droves, they're thinking of their citizenship as Pennsylvanian, I don't know. But we tend to think in terms of citizenship now,

certainly in the early twenty-first century, as a national phenomenon. One has Portuguese or German or American or whatever, Brazilian, citizenship and in some countries dual and so on. Rarely do we think of ourselves as citizens of states. But they did in the nineteenth century. Now what Miller did in this decision though was a bit weird, in retrospect. He named various national privileges and immunities--that's the language of the Fourteenth Amendment--like entering the nation's ports, or protection out on the high seas, the ability to run for federal office, and to travel to the seat of government, and so on. But he never mentioned basic civil rights, access to public facilities, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. He never mentioned the right to vote. He said all of those rights are only under the jurisdiction of the state, not the national government. In other words, traditional federalism, this separation of what states can control--like the right to vote; like what is a civil right; which civil rights; what kinds of equality are to be adjudicated in court--would be left to the states. Slaughterhouse set in motion then this federal retreat, at least in the courts--and the retreat is already happening elsewhere-- from Miller's own definition, ironically, of the meaning of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments.

Back to Colfax, Louisiana, April 14, 1873. I don't have time for all the gruesome details of this massacre, and I'll spare you most of it. But it is in some ways an American My Lai Massacre, a Katyn Forest Massacre--what the Soviets did in 1944 in Poland. One of these authors of this new book, I think a bit inappropriately, uses the term genocide, that it was a result of a wish for genocide. It is mass murder by any definition. What happened is that with these two competing governments in Louisiana--Democrat Fusion government and the Republican government--both would appoint sheriffs in the same parish. So there was the Republican sheriff, who was black, and there was the Democratic sheriff, who was white. Local officials of all kinds are being appointed. Well what happened is that the violence in the countryside got so bad, in Grant Parish, that the blacks in the area began leaving their cabins and leaving their small farms, and they came into Colfax, because Colfax had become a symbol of protection and safety for blacks in the great Red River District of Central Louisiana. By the way, the Red River Region of Central Louisiana was some of the richest soil in all of the South. It was a tremendous sugar and cotton plantation region. Several thousand acres of that Red River District, right around Colfax, was owned by a white landowner named Willie Calhoun, William Calhoun. He was the son of Meredith Calhoun, who had been a very, very proslavery, huge slaveholder before the Civil War. But his son Willie, who had been raised in part in Europe, because his parents kept living half the time in Paris, as a kid was badly, terribly injured. His back was broken. He spent his life as a hunchback. And God only knows how he came by his sympathies and his beliefs in the rights of former slaves, but he became a Unionist during the Civil War in an area where--it was not healthy to be a Unionist in the Red River District. And after the war was over, Willie Calhoun became an early-and-often

scalawag, a Republican. And he, in effect, turned over much of his land, without even selling it, to the settlement of hundreds and hundreds of freedmen and their families. Willie Calhoun would spend the Colfax Massacre watching probably 150-odd blacks murdered in cold blood, as a kind of a prisoner on his front porch.

But at any rate, blacks gathered in Colfax for weeks before the spring of '73, because it was--it had been, at least, the Calhoun Landing, as it was called, had been a place of safety. Blacks took over the courthouse in Colfax. They occupied it. They collected lots of weapons. They were ready. They built trenches all the way around the courthouse. They were ready for battle. And it is battle they got from a huge mob of disparate, paramilitary whites, many of whom were former Confederate soldiers, many of whom were former members of the Ku Klux Klan; some now called themselves Knights of the White Camellia--they went by all kinds of different names. And what happened on April 14th was indeed, in effect, a pitched battle. The whites had a cannon, lots of weapons. Blacks couldn't hold them off, they fled into the courthouse. The whites captured a black man and forced him to take a torch and they said, "We'll kill you or you take the torch and light the roof on fire." He lit the roof on fire and the courthouse began to burn down, which, of course, smoked most of the blacks out of the courthouse, although a few stayed and were burned to death, hiding under the floorboards. And as they came out many of them were executed right around the door. Before the thing was over that night, the estimate runs from about eighty to possibly as high--we'll never really know--as 150 blacks were killed--most of them execution style; most of them with shots to the head, many of them shots to the back of their heads, and many of them, in the wake of being shot, having their bodies mutilated.

The First Representatives of the Louisiana State Government, the Republican Louisiana State Government, arrived forty-eight hours after the massacre and recorded, one after another corpse, shot in the back of the head and then shot many more times, and then somebody's mutilated, and they kept this--this is this kind of gruesome need to describe you find in these reports. They also described many of the bodies being eaten by dogs and turkey vultures. Well, Colfax led to a national sensation. Harper's Weekly andLeslie's Weekly had illustrated articles about it within a week, the famous pictures of blacks carrying their dead home to bury them; quotations from women describing--a woman describing dragging her son away from the dogs who were eating his body, and so on and so forth. And it led to a national investigation, a federal investigation, led by the Republican appointed U.S. Attorney in New Orleans, whose name was James Beckwith, a northern-born New England, old abolitionist fellow with a good deal of zeal who heroically tried to bring indictments and prosecutions. There were indeed many indictments but only three convictions, in the wake of Colfax. It took over two years and it led to the second great Supreme

Court case that turned around Reconstruction. That case, first argued in Louisiana, was for the three men convicted of leading the Colfax Massacre. One of the names was a man named William Cruikshank, c-r-u-i-k-s-h-a-n-k; I don't think I put it on the outline, or did I? I guess I didn't, sorry. In the United States versus Cruikshank, the U.S. Supreme Court took up the case of these convictions in Louisiana.

The court by this time, early 1876 when the Cruikshank case came down, had a new chief justice. His name was Morrison Remick Waite, w-a-i-t-e, who'd been appointed by Grant in 1874 to replace the recently deceased Salmon P. Chase, who had been appointed Chief Justice by Abraham Lincoln. The court by 1876 was seven Republicans and two Democrats. Most of them now had been appointed by Lincoln or Grant. This was a thoroughly Republican Party Supreme Court. Waite by the way--we've been through many Supreme Court appointments in our recent lifetime and we know how political these things can get--Waite was Grant's fifth choice. The first two people he asked turned him down. I don't want to be on the Supreme Court, there's no political future there. Supreme Court justices in these years often ran for President while they were on the court, and it's--they don't do that, at least they don't do that now. The next two people he appointed, or he wanted to appoint, were turned down by the Senate. Waite was his fifth choice. Nobody had ever heard of him. He was known in Ohio, but as one of his own Supreme Court colleagues called him, said Waite was, quote, "at the front rank of second rank lawyers." And maybe it proved the old adage-- apologies to anyone from Ohio; you know the old saying; Ohio's had more presidents I think even than Virginia-- some are born great, some achieve greatness, some just come from Ohio. Morrison Waite will write the opinion, in a nine-to-nothing decision, unanimous decision, in the Cruikshank case.

This was a test, this case now, of really the Enforcement Act passed in 1870, the Enforcement Act as part of the Ku Klux Klan Acts, authorizing the federal government to enforce the right to vote, with military action if necessary, in the South. This was a case now testing that; also, of course, testing the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. The court decision in Cruikshank found the indictments, it said, faulty. It overturned two of the three convictions. It ruled that those immortal phrases of 'due process' and 'equal protection,' those two great clauses in part one of the Fourteenth Amendment, applied, they said, only to state actions, and not to the actions of individuals. If a man murders another man in Colfax, Louisiana, in a political way or any other way, that's a state matter. Even if it's around voting it's a state matter, not a federal matter; can't be adjudicated in the federal court. Federal government does not have the power to enforce the right to vote, the right to civil rights, and so on. The Cruikshank case--the implications of the Cruikshank case--immediately were obvious. It meant, number one, that mass murder went unpunished in the United States. Two, it meant that blacks increasingly now would be at the mercy of now hostile state

governments. Back when Justice Miller wrote that decision in Slaughterhouse, there were still a lot of Republican Regimes. And he claimed to his dying day he was leaving adjudication to states, under sympathetic Republic governments. Yeah, but Justice Miller, what if a government's no longer sympathetic, what if it's run by Klansmen? And three, it opened up--Cruikshank now opens up--as a federal court decision, all manner of discriminatory laws passed by what will be Democratic Redeemer governments in the Southern states.

Why was there a nine-to-nothing decision in 1876 on this, with seven of the justices appointed by Lincoln and Grant and so on? Well, one, you have to realize that by '75 and '76, when these guys were adjudicating this decision, there was a tremendous amount of just flat-out fatigue with Reconstruction. And I've been to all--I've been to a lot of your sections now and I've heard you say the same thing, and I'm not chastising you, I'm not. But sometimes we read back into the past even our own fatigue with certain issues. They were sort of fed-up with Reconstruction in the North. Well yeah, they were, but look at the consequences. It's clear, even in their own writings, that many of the justices just wanted to get rid of Reconstruction and leave it to the South. It signaled now, most importantly--and Foner makes this point in the one little paragraph he gives you on the Cruikshank case--it signaled now that the federal government was, in effect, exiting Reconstruction; certainly the Supreme Court was. And as Foner says, terror was given a green light anywhere that a state government was unwilling to enforce the law or protect people.

Now, why was Radicalism waning in the 1870s, or even at the beginning of the 1870s? What is it about the Grant years, especially the second Grant Administration, that leads--that just practically paves these roads to a Southern redemption, a Southern counter-revolution? Well there are many factors, and let me kind of run through them and then focus especially on the scandals, for a moment, and then on this larger question of violence; in case you haven't heard enough about violence. First of all there's the Panic of 1873, which hit in the spring of 1873. A major economic depression had hit the country--eventually the entire country--that led to a great deal of labor strife and violence. It meant in the wake of the--well, in the midst of the Panic of '73, into '74, '75, that the issues now that politicians were most concerned about, and that voters were most concerned about, particularly in the North, were things like currency, tariffs, unemployment, railroad subsidies, labor strife, whether a union had the right to strike here or the right to strike there. And across the great Midwest, among farmers, the biggest issue was the price of wheat, which dropped from two dollars a barrel to fifty cents in a year and a half. Wages for manufacturing laborers in the United States, in a year and a half, dropped by fifty percent across the country; that's for those who kept their jobs. The Panic of 1873 shifted people's minds, to say the least.

Then there's the factor of--the nature of Grant's presidency; the way in which Grant himself even defined the presidency. Grant, you'll remember, was a rather reluctant politician, at first. He actually got a little better at it than his historical reputation has sometimes led us to believe. Grant could be very political. Although he did have this idea that the presidency ought to be--especially in these crisis years, with the tremendous bitterness, bloody shirt tensions after the Civil War; and after all, he's the general that won the war and obliterated Virginia--that the president ought to be now just basically a caretaker, ought to have as few opinions as possible; a caretaker presidency, not so much a leader as a unifier. Now his hands-off approach to so many things, of course, is what, in part, led to the scandals that have so long been associated with him, or at least with his administration. I would argue that Grant has gotten, to some extent, a bad rap, from some historians, although if you look at any of those lists that come out every year, when they survey historians--the greatest presidents, the worst presidents--Lincoln's always at the top and then you get FDR; now Reagan is always in the top three, for reasons I don't even want to discuss. [Laughter] Well, a lot of airports are named for him, I guess that's why. At any rate, enough on that. Grant has always been down near the bottom. I can't resist this. The great American cynic of the nineteenth century, one of our greatest historians and one of our most beautiful writers--but what a cynic--Henry Adams, son of Charles Francis Adams, grandson of Quincy, great-grandson of John. This was his description of Grant, and he was living the Grant Administration: "Grant had no right to exist." [Laughter] "He should've been extinct for ages. That 2000 years after Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, a man like Grant should be called and should actually and truly be the highest product of the most advanced evolution, made evolution ludicrous. The progress of evolution, from President Washington to President Grant, was alone evidence enough to upset Darwin. Grant should've lived in a cave and worn skins." Oh. [Laughter] That's cold, and unfair.

But under his leadership a whole series of four or five different scandals that sort of set the standard [laughs] for scandal to come in American history; although we've had some much worse ones since than some of these. Most of them were of course financial. There's almost no sex in the Grant scandal years, so far as we can tell. The first was the Gold Scandal. This was an attempt to corner the gold market by one Jay Gould and James Fisk. These were Wall Street guys in New York. This is in 1869, right after Grant took office. They did indeed corner the market on gold. They tried to buy up all the gold in New York, and then they planned to force bankers and business people to buy the gold from them at inflated prices--it's an old cornering trick. They made eleven million dollars in three weeks doing this, in the nineteenth century. They were eventually selling that gold at $163.50 per ounce. And the only way to break their corner was--suddenly, because it happened so fast--was for the Federal Government to begin selling all of its gold, put it on the market, get the prices down.

Grant's brother-in-law--never appoint your brother-in-law to anything--Abel Corbin was a sort of personal emissary. He assured and promised the plotters, Gould and Fisk, that he had influence on Grant and that Grant would never permit the government's gold to be sold. But he was wrong and Grant did allow it to be sold. And then Grant's treasury secretary, George Boutwell, got involved. The scandal finally broke open in the press, and though nothing ever really happened to Gould or Fisk--setting in motion a history of who gets caught and who doesn't get caught in the Wall Street world--it was the first scandal of its kind that began to lead to cries of civil service reform, which became a big rallying cry in the 1870s.

Then there was the Whiskey Ring. Man, this was old-fashioned, just unadulterated fraud. This began in the early 1870s. It first started in St. Louis. It was really a cartel, what we in modern times would call the creation of a cartel. These were whiskey distillers, all over the country, who banded together to cheat the U.S. Government out of excise taxes; the luxury tax on whiskey. The way that they did it is many distillers were forced to join this ring of people around the country or have their businesses ruined; join or we'll run you out of business. The Whiskey Ring had branch offices all over the country, in cities like Milwaukee and Peoria, New Orleans, Chicago, Cincinnati, in Washington, and many other cities, North, South, West, you name it. And then they started bribing the Treasury Department, which of course is where the excise taxes would go to. Many officials in the Treasury Department were soon on the payroll of the Whiskey Ring, especially the chief clerk of the U.S. Treasury Department, the man who kept the books. One General Orville Babcock, the president's private secretary, was implicated; more than implicated, he was involved. He was charged eventually, although acquitted. Grant entered a deposition on his behalf and his good character and so on, in court--which he never should have done. He didn't really look at the facts, he didn't look at the evidence. The point of all this one is that millions and millions of dollars in liquor revenues were lost to the U.S. Government, from about 1870 to 1875, and most of that money went into the pockets of whiskey distillers and a lot of it went into the pockets of Treasury Department officials who were themselves supposed to be collecting the tax. The estimate is that between forty and fifty million dollars was grafted in this particular scandal. The scandal broke in 1875. There were about 150 people indicted in the liquor business, about eighty-five people indicted in the federal government. There were 110 convictions, although nobody served terribly long in any prison.

And thirdly, there's this thing called Crédit Mobilier. This was the company that was first chartered in 1859 as part of--it was the finance company for the Pennsylvania, it was called the Pennsylvania Fiscal Agency originally, it was the finance company for the Union Pacific Railroad, that got the greatest contract in American history to build the Transcontinental Railroad. The Union Pacific had a charter from the federal

government to build this great railroad to the Pacific, or possibly two or three of them. For each mile of track built the Union Pacific was to receive ten sections of public land, and from 16,000 to 48,000 dollars, depending on how difficult the terrain was to build on. The Union Pacific arranged the construction contracts with its own firm, that it called Crédit Mobilier, so that all government money would get spent. You know the old routine, if you get a grant, make sure you spend it because they won't give you as much next time. Crédit Mobilier, and therefore Union Pacific, made enormous profits. The shares of stock in Crédit Mobilier skyrocketed, and to keep the federal government in line and to let this continue to go on, many congressmen--we'll never know exactly how many--were on the take, were simply being bribed, in old-fashioned handfuls of cash, by the Union Pacific. This scandal too broke in 1873. All kinds of people were accused, including Vice-President Schuyler Colfax. Congress reprimanded one government railroad agent and two congressmen, and then just left it alone. So far as I know, no one's ever really put a price tag on the graft committed by the Union Pacific in the Crédit Mobilier case. This kind of spoils-men financial corruption became rampant in the Grant years, and again a huge political distraction away from the issues of the South, the issues of the freedmen, the issues of Reconstruction.

The other major path to Southern redemption, the success of the white Southern Democratic Party, was of course the uses of violence. But before I give you a little more litany on the level of Klan terrorism, think with me for just a moment what those Radical Republicans originally--almost none of whom are really in power anymore: Thaddeus Stevens died in 1869; Charles Sumner dies in 1874; Benjamin Wade is long gone, as a senator from Ohio. The old leadership of the Radicals is really no longer there by 1874, when the Democrats are going to throw the Republicans out of the leadership of the Congress anyway. But think with me for just a moment, back to what Foner called the Radicals' civic vision. That civic vision again was rooted in Free Soilism, Unionism, winning the war, and ending slavery, emancipation, and then to at least the beginnings of racial equality. You cannot mistake that they believed in at least the beginnings of that in the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.

But think for a moment, in the nineteenth century how would most Americans think about the idea of equality? I would argue that in our history, this nation in the modern world that probably tried to do more about the idea of equality than perhaps any place else, has gone through three definitions of equality. The first we might simply call equality in the eyes of God, or natural rights. The old Enlightenment--it's not just from the Enlightenment, it's in the Epistles of Paul, it's ancient in some ways--but the idea that somehow you're born equal before God or nature, that you have a natural capacity that's equal. It doesn't say anything about human affairs. It doesn't say anything about

government or law. The second kind of equality that came into history is equality before law. That was never codified, never spoken, until the Fourteenth Amendment; the equal protection of the law. That's where it begins. If there's a third kind of equality in our history it's probably what we came to call, in the twentieth century, and especially in the Civil Rights Revolution and its wake, an equality of opportunity.

In the nineteenth century trust--they never got to that one, and they didn't get terribly far with equality before law. The Radical Republicans' ideas were up against--and here you can just give up and say, "well you see, what--they tried to go too far too fast; they were ahead of their times; gee whiz, Reconstruction failed, maybe it should've failed, can't do anything about it, so be it; well the lights went out for 75 or 80 years but that's-- you know, some things are inevitable in history." If you're comfortable with that, fine. But the Radical Republican ideology at least set in motion a tradition. The problem was they got cornered themselves by their own language, because the language they got cornered by was the language of guaranteed rights. If you guaranteed somebody's beginnings of equality in law, what else is there to do? If you and I are equal before the law, at least the law says we're equal before the law, what else can government do? But the Radical Republicans in Reconstruction launched that question into our history, as no one ever had. What do governments owe people and what do people owe governments?

The trouble, of course, was that on-the-ground in the South, the Klan, and all of its imitators, were winning Reconstruction by terror, by political violence, by intimidation. Now you've read about the Klan. I've given you statistics on Klan violence, especially in 1868 up through 1871. But it was the first Grant Administration--and we've got to give Grant credit for this, and Henry Adams should've at least thought of this when he wrote that God-awful passage--the Grant Administration did act, in 1870 and '71, against the Klan. May 31, 1870, it passed the so-called Force Act, or the First Enforcement Act. It made it a federal offence to interfere with any person's right to vote and made it punishable in a federal court. That's the very law the Cruikshank case is going to come, along six years later and say, "no, the federal government can't enforce that, only the state can." It's one of those moments you want to go back into history and just grab some people by the collar and say, "No, no, no, no, think one more time." But, of course we can't do that.

February 28, 1871, the Second Force Act, provided a machinery for the federal supervision of registration and voting in the South. It had at least tried. And finally they passed what was called the Ku Klux Klan Act; April 20, 1871. It authorized the President to use the Army and to suspend the writ of habeas corpus wherever he deemed necessary, if there was a state of insurrection--which there was in South Carolina, in about twelve counties. Move the Army in, if necessary, to protect the

safety and security of elections. Now, under this authority of these Enforcement Acts and the Klan Acts, approximately 3000 people, mostly white Southerners, were indicted for Klan violence--murder, intimidation, torture. Thousands were arrested. Many of those 3000 indicted pleaded guilty and got suspended sentences. About 600 were convicted, 250 acquitted. Most received fines or light jail sentences. Sixty-five people were imprisoned for up to five years in a federal penitentiary in Albany, New York. All of them were out by 1875, before the Cruikshank Case. The thousands of people murdered by the Klan, the thousands tortured, the thousands kept from voting--sixty-five people were prosecuted. If you think back to the other day, that quotation I asked you to keep in your head, when Frederick Douglass gives that speech in 1875, imagining the following year the centennial of U.S. independence, and he worries about all the hosannas to American patriotism and to independence, and he says "if war among the whites brought freedom to blacks, what will peace among the whites bring?" It is a peace among the whites that was happening, by 1875. On Thursday we'll move this toward one of the ends of Reconstruction.

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Civil War and Reconstruction: Lecture 26 TranscriptApril 24, 2008<< back

Professor David Blight: In his little novel The Hamlet, William Faulkner has a line he puts in the mouth of one of his characters. It's one of the Snopes'. There's lots of Snopes' in Faulkner's novels, especially that novel. It comes from the deep, dark heart, as only Faulkner really wrote it, of the burden of the past, of memory of slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction on the South, but he's really referring to all of us, he's referring to humanity. It's one of the best single sentence descriptive explanations of what happened to the legacy and memory of all these events I've ever read. He has his character say, "Only thank God men have done learned how to forget quick what they ain't brave enough to try to cure." I'll do it once more. "Only thank God men have done learned how to forget quick what they ain't brave enough to cure." Can't solve that problem, weighed down too heavily by that problem, don't have the solutions for all the world's ills, it's an ancient problem, it's a natural problem, forget it, try to forget it. Structure ways to forget it.

Americans weren't forgetting by 1876, at least in a host of ways. They were about to have the magnificent centennial of their independence. Now that year will bring, as we'll see in a moment, a pivotal election, to say the least. It'll end in a disputed--the first--not the first, really the second--great disputed election in American history, and a sordid political compromise that most of us in textbooks and in teaching still call the end of Reconstruction. But I'm going to leave that question of when Reconstruction ended to all the great forthcoming books of my various graduate students who are going to solve that issue, and I'm going to probably suggest before we finish that it's never quite ended. But listen to just a couple of the public commentaries, that year, of America's centennial of independence and what they were thinking about. The New York Evening Post announced: "The great work of the century," it said, "is finished, and the year which is about to dawn will be the very first one wholly free from the duty of dealing with the old and dangerous subject. Slavery died in this country ten years ago, but not until now have we finished the work of readjusting our national life to the new order of things. Not until now have the questions which grew out of slavery been fully and finally settled. Not until now have the echoes of the war died out of our politics and our lives." Just listen to how conclusive that is--it's over folks. Or the Springfield Republican, a Republican Party paper, an old abolitionist paper, 1876: "We must get rid of the Southern question. There is no chance or hope of healthy politics until we do get rid of it. So long as the war issues are capable of being warmed over, from year to year, and election to election, so long as a large section of the country is disturbed by violence and paralyzed by misgovernment, so long as

white is arrayed against black, so long will our politics be feverish with this disease." Multiple choice question: what's the disease? You can make up the answers and you can pick. Or the New York Times, not a liberal paper in these years: "Ten years ago the North was nearly united in a feeling of sympathy for the freedmen and in a determination to defend their rights. Now, not a few believe that the rights of the whites are those which have been infringed upon." Historical memory is always a contest, it's always a struggle, it's always a battle, a debate over who gets to own it, control it, narrate it, organize it, declare it. And everybody was trying.

But in Philadelphia they put on the biggest show the United States had ever put on, the biggest show the United States had ever attempted. The United States Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876, throughout that, from spring all the way through the fall, was attended by--it's really almost hard to believe--but it was attended by ten million people. That was close to one-fourth of the entire U.S. population. Imagine today an exposition, an event, attended--physically now, not on the Internet and television--attended by one-quarter of us. They had a wax replica of Cleopatra there, a huge thing. What the hell that had to do with the U.S. Centennial, God only knows. But you know, when you want to be a great country you got to reach over history and back to classical times. The great theme of the exposition, of course, though, was machines. It was the Machine Age. It was the excitement of technology. They had a telephone there, a typewriter, an electric light, a new floor-cloth called linoleum. They celebrated packaged yeast and something called--are you ready?--the internal combustion engine. The Corliss steam engine. A gigantic thing, it's now today in the Smithsonian, in Washington--you can see this, it's an amazing thing. It was 700 tons and forty-feet high, and people looked at it in awe. This thing was going to make energy, for the future. Machines and technology, it was said, over and over and over and over, were remaking American society, would remake its future, and would make the United States the greatest manufacturing, industrial producing nation on earth. True.

All of this national self-congratulation ignored or masked some of the less admiral features of American life. And of course it would. You don't have a national centennial celebration and then say, "Oh by the way, you can buy your ticket here to celebrate and you can buy your ticket here to look at all of our tragedies." We don't do that, do we? But it doesn't mean that history's not happening. The Pennsylvania and Massachusetts exhibitions--every state had one--made no mention of the great labor strikes that had just hit their states, even though twenty-seven of the very textile mills that had just been struck in Fall River, Massachusetts, exhibited their wares at the exposition. There was no mention whatsoever of the enduring economic depression, which was still going on in 1876. There was a Women's Pavilion, added as an afterthought at the last minute. It housed collections of needlework and weaving and

demonstrations of power looms. There were no mentions whatsoever of women's political subordination or activism, the crusade for women's suffrage which was going on everywhere. Women suffragists tried to be recognized and to protest, in fact, at the exhibition; weren't allowed to. Women's place in this was essentially apolitical.

For African Americans there were no exhibits at all about them. They were even excluded from the construction crews that built all the halls. There was something called a Southern Restaurant, which according to the guidebook featured, quote, "a band of old-time plantation darkies performing songs." There was a bale of Benjamin Montgomery's cotton, from Davis Bend, Mississippi, which won an agricultural medal at the exposition, beating out cotton from all over the South and from Brazil and from Egypt and the Fiji Islands and other places, but no mention whatsoever made of the recent violent overthrow of reconstruction in Mississippi. American Indians were represented at the exposition but almost exclusively depicted as a people of the past, or as harmless and primitive noble savages. They were either a vanishing Indian or an Indian of a kind of cultural mystique, a deeply American mystique. And then came the news right after the 4th of July where some real Indians rudely interrupted all the celebrations. The news arrived that General George Armstrong Custer had been defeated, indeed wiped out, all his men killed--well almost all--by the Sioux, led by Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, at a place called Little Bighorn. Custer's Last Stand, images of which would end up behind the bar in every saloon west of the Mississippi, and a hell of a lot of them east of the Mississippi, for the rest of that century. That victory for the Indians, of course, would be a pyrrhic victory in their struggle to hold onto land, culture, place.

What was also occurring here, by 1876, of course, the subtext of this great national celebration, if not its central theme, was the sectional North/South reunion, the great reconciliation from the Civil War. Now one might say that's inevitable, it had to happen. I said this at the beginning of our whole unit on Reconstruction, the North and the South had to come back together. The South wasn't going to go somewhere, you couldn't exile them all to Brazil. But in that reconciliation, as Faulkner said in that passage, there is a tremendous amount of forgetting going on about that which people cannot or will not cure. And what is going on in great part is that peace among the whites that Frederick Douglass had worried about the year before, in 1875. Back up with me now though to 1874, at least quickly. We're going to look at two elections today, which kind of move us toward what we can at least call some vestige of an end of Reconstruction. The 1874 congressional elections took on a significance that off-year congressional elections don't always have; although we've had some of these kinds of off-year congressional elections in our own lifetime, in recent years. Like 1994, which you may or not remember, when the Gingrich Republican movement

took over the Congress and after 40 years of Democratic rule they were gone. And then in '06, the Democrats take back both houses of Congress, etcetera.

In essence, the '74 congressional elections were a referendum on Reconstruction. You'll remember the Slaughterhouse case had come out in '73. The Depression had set in surely by 1874, deeply, and certainly by the fall elections of 1874. This became the great takeover of Congress by the Democratic Party, so under duress since the Civil War, since they had been the party, in many ways, that had not favored the war for the Union or the war to free the slaves. And its coverage in the press after this tells it all. TheBuffalo Advertiser says, in the wake of it, its headline: "Republican Party Struck by Lightening," it said. Or another newspaper, the Louisville Courier Journal, a Democratic paper, said, headline: "Busted, the Radical Machine Gone to Smash." But what happened was this. The Democrats captured the House of Representatives. It went from a Republican majority of 110--that's how many more Republicans there were than Democrats on the eve of this election. This is the Republican Party now that has run Congress, since Abraham Lincoln's election. For the whole Civil War and Reconstruction it's been a Republican Congress. They went from a Republican majority of 110 overnight to a Democratic Party majority of sixty. In the wake of the election there were 109 Republicans left and there were 169 Democrats. And it upset patterns, the election did, in state after state after state, that were two, at least two decades old, in American political culture. Democrats took back a small majority of the Senate. But at the state and local level it was just as important. Democrats won the Governor's Office in New York and Massachusetts; in fact, they won the Governor's Office in something like twenty-three states. Of thirty-five states holding elections, twenty-three state legislatures went to Democrats.

Southerners now, with their party, the Democratic Party, which was now a national party, no longer have to feel like aliens in their native land. And this is what newspapers all over the place kept writing, over and over, in celebration. Listen to this one. This was a Tennessee paper, a Nashville paper, which said, I quote: "The recent election was not an election," said the Tennessee paper. "It was a country coming to a halt and changing front. The whole scheme of Reconstruction stands before the country today a naked, confessed, stupendous failure; at once the most remarkable and the most inexcusable failure in all of history." A little hyperbole, but making their case. The cause is, of course, relatively obvious, but it was still a shock, certainly to Republicans. There was tremendous fatigue with the reformist--in the political culture, including the North, or especially the North--there was tremendous political fatigue with the reformist spirit of the Republican Party. The economic depression was absolutely central to this election and why the Dems came back. The scandals and mismanagement of the Grant years already setting in. It was a big deal by '74; it's going to be an even bigger deal by 1876. The Democrats are going to portray

themselves now as the Reform Party, the party of civil service reform, the party of clean government.

Most of all, I'd say, the Republican Party by 1874--and how many times have you seen this in American political history?--the Republican Party of 1874 paid a high price for its recent history of support of black rights and the idea of racial equality. Just exactly as the Democratic Party would do in the wake of LBJ's Great Society, the '64 and '65 Civil Rights Acts, the famous moment when Bill Moyers tells us--or was it Bill Moyers who said to LBJ; was it LBJ that said to Bill Moyers, after they passed the '65 Civil Rights Act; which way was it? It's LBJ to Bill Moyers, as only LBJ could. He probably said something--well I'll clean it up. "Well Bill, we've done lost the South for a generation, because of what we just passed." And LBJ will only live to 1971, of course; he won't live to quite see it, but he was absolutely right. Southern redemption kept happening, although seven of the eleven Southern ex-Confederate states were already back under the control of the Southern Democratic Party, even before this. Now in the wake of this election--one more will come more the next year, and only three will be left, by the '76 presidential contest; South Carolina, Mississippi and Louisiana unredeemed, as the South put it.

This was an election also all about this emerging reunion, or reconciliation, of some kind. Let me give you a couple of illustrations of what happened in the wake of this election. In Vicksburg, Mississippi, the following summer--and there's actually, there's a bit about this in Nick Lemann's book, which you're reading, and I'm sparing you any lecturing about what happened in Mississippi in 1875 because that's what Lemann's book is all about, the so-called Shotgun Policy, the violent overthrow of Reconstruction by the white Democratic Party in Mississippi. But in Vicksburg, Vicksburg of all places, blacks held a very public 4th of July celebration in 1875, and that took courage, it was bold. Their own politicians spoke. A black Republican circuit judge gave a speech. The black secretary of state in Mississippi gave a remarkable speech, a somewhat challenging speech to the Democrats. And just as he was ending his speech a mob of about fifty white people invaded the big hall they were having it in, and a shot was fired as a signal, and they opened up, and they just started firing. They killed two on the spot, wounded about ten, that died later. It was a 4th of July celebration, stopped by cold-blooded murder. There was an observer, at this event, an African-American, who wrote an account of it, under the pseudonym Veni Vidi, which means I came, I saw, and it was published in the New York Herald Tribune, as well as the Christian Recorder and some other places. He laid the blame for this not on that white mob. I mean, they were tired of blaming white rednecks in the South for killing them. Veni Vidi blamed it on national reconciliation. He said the killings on the 4th of July in Vicksburg were because, quote, "Boston and Ohio were holding the coats for Georgia and Mississippi while they slay the common victim of

northern prejudice and southern hate." That's a very clear, on the ground, eyewitness description of where responsibility now for this may lie; not just with the mob but with the folk who are allowing the mob to do its business.

All right, between 1874 and 1876 arguably what the country is assessing--and you can see who's winning--what the country is assessing is the question, which revolution is actually going to win? If this is a second American Revolution, which is a construction historians have put onto this over time, with different meanings; Charles Beard had a different meaning than Eric Foner, and others of us have used it. But which revolution would prevail? Is it the revolution of 1863 to '65? Is it the revolution that Abraham Lincoln finally named, and then said would be enforced, very bluntly, in his Second Inaugural? "With every drop of blood shed by the lash it shall be paid in blood shed by the sword." Or is it the other revolution, the counter-revolution, the white Southern Democratic revolution against Reconstruction, against the changes of the Civil War, against the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments? Which revolution? The revolution of black freedom or the redemption of white supremacy? Those are the stakes. Those are very, very high stakes.

In fact, just let me use a picture or two for the heck of it. This may go without saying, but not really. Which image did Americans, white Americans, which image, in their minds, in their brains, when they went to the polls--what image when we go to the polls now do most white Americans want of black people? Is it him? Is it that genius in his perfect white shirts who could speak and write like Goethe, and would remind you of it, and would explain things in language that might make you quiver in your seat? Is it black genius they wanted to see? Or--I don't know if you can see that--did they want to see Chloe and Sam? It's a painting by Thomas Hovenden, a wonderful painter. He's the same painter who painted that colossal painting of John Brown with the rifle in one hand and the Bible in the other and hair on fire; it's at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, go see it. Anyway, Hovenden's painting here, a beautiful, a sentimental--I'm not sure how carefully you can see this or how well you can see this with the lighting in here. It's Chloe and Sam, it's two old freedmen. Sam seems to be cooling down the teapot maybe. Chloe's ironing. They got their own house. He hunts. They're peaceful, they're settled. They're the old slaves. There's Aunt Chloe and Uncle Sam, and they're not going to threaten anybody. Well forgive this image, this is--I don't know who drew this, it just comes from the Library of Congress. Or is this an image now that a lot of Americans, they may not prefer it, but are certainly willing to accept about the sons and daughters of Chloe and Sam, who got really assertive, who wanted to vote, who were holding office, who were walking in their perfect white shirts and their suits in the halls of Congress and the halls of state legislatures, who insisted on education and property ownership and all those crazy rights of citizenship? Where should black people be in that imagination?

All right, the election of 1876 comes. If the election of 1874 was a referendum on Reconstruction, the election of 1876 was a referendum, if you like, on reunion. How indeed would this reunion actually occur? Would there really truly be a reunion? Now this was an election, of course, where both parties now, for the first time since the Civil--well for the first time really since before the Civil War. In fact you certainly could argue that it's the first time since really 1856 that two parties in an American presidential election have faced each other as truly national and virtually equal in power, authority, membership to some degree, and so on. It's the Centennial year. It comes in the wake of these tremendous scandals of the second Grant Administration. The Whiskey Ring wasn't blown open until the second term. Crédit Mobilier wasn't blown open 'till the second term; the Belknap Scandal not 'till the second term. The Democrats now, in '76, they're going to portray themselves again--as they had in '74 but now it's a presidential election--as the party of reform, the party of clean government and, thank you very much, the party of white supremacy that'll finally put Reconstruction to death in those three states in the South where it still exists in some form. The election was a test of either reunion or redemption and on whose terms.

The Democrats ran for president Samuel J. Tilden. He was the governor of New York. Governors of New York have often been candidates for president for a whole variety of good reasons. He was one of the richest men in the United States. He was a very wealthy trial lawyer. He had a reputation for reform based largely on the fact that he had gone--as the governor of New York--he had gone after Boss Tweed, who ran the boss system of New York City, and as the press always put it, he bagged him, he got him. He found him--he got him on charges. They were able to prosecute against Boss Tweed. So Tilden cleaned up New York, they said, to some degree. Now the Republicans, on the other hand, now needed a new face, somebody untainted by the Grant Administration, and somebody who had some distance from Reconstruction. But it was still terribly important to run a veteran. And this is going to be the case for years in American history. In the South, you couldn't get elected a governor or a senator from a southern state for the next 25 years if you weren't a Confederate veteran. And it surely helped you in the North if you were a Union veteran. So they went to Ohio, that seedbed of presidents--no more jokes about Ohio--and they found Rutherford B. Hayes. Now Hayes had many things going for him. He had indeed been a Civil War--he was a Civil War veteran. He'd been wounded about six times in the war. He was a serious combat survivor. He'd also been elected Governor of Ohio three times. He was known to be a conservative, not terribly engaged in Reconstruction issues. Oh, he supported black rights in some sort of general way. He will promise something for almost everyone, depending on where he went, in the vaguest possible terms, and he will inspire, once again, that cynical SOB, Henry Adams, for one of the best descriptions I've ever read of Rutherford Hayes. A little unfair, as Adams always was as a satirist. Henry Adams said Rutherford Hayes was a, quote, "third-rate, non-

entity whose only recommendation is that he is obnoxious to no one." You know, how many times have we done this in our politics though? Find somebody that nobody quite knows, doesn't have a lot of enemies, got elected, no strong views, and run him; yes, and provided you don't have a year and a half bloody primary to put him through.

Now, this would be a brutal, brutal election, in its rhetoric. Just an example or two. Republicans now, facing this frankly virulently, openly white supremacist campaign on the part of the Democrats, but also facing the charges of scandal and corruption, which are very real, they want to misdirect people's, their attention. They don't want people to think about those scandals, and if they can help it they don't even want people to have to think about Reconstruction for awhile. So what do they do? They wave the bloody shirt. When in doubt in the nineteenth century, for the Republican--and they're going to keep doing it right on up through the 1896 election, against William Jennings Bryan; that's getting ahead of ourselves. But man, they're going to trot out every living, surviving, sentient Civil War general, by as late as 1896, put them on trains and barnstorm them all over the country, and paint William Jennings Bryan as a secessionist, because he was a populist.

At any rate, here's one example of the kind of bloody shirt rhetoric that the Republican Party trotted out against the Democrats in 1876. This came from Colonel Robert Ingersoll, a famous agnostic; a very popular orator, especially at Grand Army of the Republic reunions and political gatherings. He said this in September of '76. Quote--classic bloody shirt: "Every state that seceded from the United States was a Democratic state. Every man that tried to destroy this nation was a Democrat. Every man that loved slavery better than liberty was a Democrat. The man that assassinated Abraham Lincoln was a Democrat. Every man that raised bloodhounds to pursue human beings was a Democrat. Soldiers, every scar you have got on your heroic bodies was given to you by a Democrat." And those Union veterans would get up and cheer, "Yay, scars, Democrat scars." [Laughter] It worked, it worked in a lot of places. The war is only ten years ago, and there are hundreds of thousands of Union veterans. They are the base of the Republican Party, a deep, broad base, especially across the Midwest, which is where they're all moving, and in the far West; Civil War veterans are moving west.

In the election again the rhetoric got terrible and when the election was held it was a very violent election. We'll never know, no one will ever know, how many thousands of African-American voters, especially in the three states of Mississippi, Louisiana and South Carolina--excuse me, Mississippi, South Carolina and Louisiana as well, but also Florida--we'll never know how many were intimidated and kept from the polls. We know it was thousands, hundreds of thousands in all likelihood. One Republican official in Mississippi, observing the election, said in his view the white

population was essentially one vast mob. Now what happened, of course, is that Tilden carried all of--a map here may be useful--Tilden--I don't know how well you can see that but at least you see the contours of it--Tilden, the Democrat, carried all of the solid South except--now solid Democratic South--except three states, the three states remaining under teetering Republican regimes, Louisiana, South Carolina and Florida. Tilden also carried four northern states: his own, New York; New Jersey; Connecticut; and Indiana. Hayes carried all the rest of the North and much of the West. But without the three southern states counted, Louisiana, Florida and South Carolina, the electoral count--and when the returns came in, that night and the next day; and it took longer in those years, it took at least twenty-four hours after an election ended, and sometimes forty-eight hours before they even had real, official counts. In the Electoral College--now first of all there's no question that at least in the votes cast, Tilden won the popular vote. If you like, in terms of numbers, he's the Al Gore of the 1876 election, he won the popular vote, of the votes cast. Now how many hundreds of thousands, particularly of black Republicans who didn't vote, for fear for their lives, we don't know.

In the Electoral College, before you count the three disputed states, the number was 184 to 166, Tilden to Hayes. It took 185 to be elected. The handwriting on the wall initially was that--well, even in the official Republican Party offices in Washington DC, as the returns were coming in the next day, they were about to hold news conferences, send out messages and say, "Well guys, guess we lost." And then quickly, quickly, inside their offices, they realized that there were nineteen electoral votes in the three disputed states, and they said, "No news conferences, we're going to win those three." How? Well that remains to be seen. The disputed election of 1876 was disputed over the three states, that still had Republican regimes, that had widespread fraud, violence and intimidation practice in their elections. No one will ever know, as long as we live, exactly who won where, although we do have some good guesses now from scholarship. But what ensued was the longest disputed election we've ever had. The Gore/Bush affair of 2000 lasted, what, thirty-five days before the Supreme Court chose our president. It isn't going to be a lot different here, although the Supreme Court will have only a very limited role. The official popular vote count in 1876 was four million, two-hundred and eighty-four thousand-some odd votes for Tilden and four million, thirty-six thousand and some odd votes for Hayes. That was an official popular vote. One of the best ways to think about this election is that frankly the Democrats stole it and then the Republicans stole it back. I hate to sound so cynical but frankly folks that's essentially what happened.

Under the Twelfth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, of course, if there's a disputed election and no one gets a majority of the Electoral College--we ignored this one in 2000; I just thought I'd point that out--it is supposed to go to the House of

Representatives, and the House of Representatives, in its good councils, shall choose the President, says the U.S. Constitution. They followed the Constitution in 1876, they actually did; well, to a degree they did. With the country waiting, with all kinds of rumors flying in the press--I went back and studied the press in these disputed months for this earlier book I did on memory, and it's amazing the rumors. You've got southern papers like the Atlanta Constitution printing long stories about local militias in upstate New York that are drilling, calling themselves the Sons of Liberty, readying themselves to march into the South. And you've got northern papers like the Chicago Tribune printing article after article about Confederate mobs and militias, they're drilling all over the South and preparing themselves to march into the North; most of which were completely false. But it became long, tense, winter months of fear. And now, of course, when fear sets in, blood memory sets in. The United States House of Representatives decided to establish an Electoral Commission. It would have 15 members. There would be five Republicans, five Democrats, and five Supreme Court Justices--fifteen people. Sounds relatively fair. Not quite. Three of the Supreme Court Justices were Republicans, two of them were Democrats. That means there eight Republicans and seven Democrats on this Electoral Commission. The job of this Electoral Commission was to investigate the voting returns of the three disputed states of Louisiana, Florida and South Carolina. They were to study the returns. The Democrats in Congress initiated a long filibuster, and they held it. They started a filibuster in December of '76 and they're still doing it. They're reading city directories and whatever other garbage--they didn't have phone books yet. They were just reading newspaper articles, day in and day out, until the third week--fourth week of February of '77. Nothing went on in the U.S. Congress. There were threats of disunion. Hot-headed Democrats would announce the slogan 'Tilden or fight.' President Ulysses Grant, lame duck, can't wait to get out of office; already has his ship booked for his grand tour around the world. He'll leave on May 17th for the greatest tour any American ever made of Planet Earth--that's another story. But Grant quietly began to rebuild and re-garrison some of the forts around Washington DC.

And lo and behold, the commission met, and lo and behold they voted. Guess what? It's a suspense. They voted eight to seven that the Republican, Hayes, had won in Louisiana, Florida and South Carolina, based on the theory of widespread fraud and violence. Now there's a lot to that. They never really knew what those voting counts were, to be honest. But the way in which the disputed election of 1876 was settled, of course, was ultimately not even by that Electoral Commission. It was settled in the Wormley Hotel, on February 26th and 27th of 1877, in a forty-eight hour meeting between five Ohio Republicans, representing Hayes, and four Southern Democrats, representing Tilden. The Compromise of 1877, as it is called, was a deal. It was a deal based on interests, not on votes. The Democrats were willing to give up the presidency if they could get in return what they most needed. They wanted federal

subsidies for a Western Pacific Railroad, at least one, with a southern terminus. They wanted their harbors dredged. They wanted federal subsidies to rebuild the infrastructure of the South. Lo and behold, they wanted federal money; all these states' rights southern Democrats, thank you very much, they wanted federal money to rebuild their society. "Bring us your investments," they'd been saying for a long time to carpetbaggers, "just don't come here and try to get elected." Here was the deal. And by the way, one of the chief brokers, there were several chief brokers. One was James Garfield, of Ohio, a close personal friend and associate of Rutherford B. Hayes; later succeeded him as President of the United States, and to be assassinated. But the other great broker at the '77 Compromise was Tom Scott, the president of the Texas Pacific Railroad. He'd been one of the great American railroad kings for years and he brokered really especially the economic/financial parts of this deal.

Here was the deal. Home rule, the Republicans said, would be returned to Louisiana, South Carolina and Florida. The Republicans agreed to let the southern Democrats take over those three states, abandoning their own party leaders, abandoning a lot of black elected officials who are still running those governments, and the Republicans promised they would help get Democrats elected governors of those states. They agreed to remove all final federal troops from the South. And this has always been a big symbolic thing; well, which is exactly what it is, it's a big symbolic thing. There were very few troops left anywhere in the South and those few thousand that were still there are located in forts along the coast. And quietly Ulysses Grant signed a bill in the third week of February, just before the deal at the Wormley Hotel, that repealed the law placing those troops in the South. One, and possibly two, cabinet positions in Hayes' cabinet were promised to Southern Democrats. They particularly promised the Postmaster Generalship, because of its patronage powers. The Democrats agreed to help James Garfield become Speaker of the House. It's a deal folks; quid pro quo, tit for tat. The Democrats agreed to enforce--well, I can almost not say this one--the Democrats agreed to enforce the Civil War amendments and black civil rights--uh huh--and the Democrats agreed to stop their filibuster, accept the official count, and allow Hayes to be peacefully inaugurated three days later or four days later.

On March 3rd, Rutherford B. Hayes was privately inaugurated. No outdoor inauguration on the steps of the capitol, as they are always done. They feared violence, interruptions. They didn't know what was going to happen. He was privately inaugurated, quietly in the East Room of the White House. Catastrophe had been averted, but at what a price. C. Vann Woodward once accurately called this compromise a treaty, as much as a compromise. And if the Compromise of 1850, you'll remember, is so often referred to as an armistice, rather than a compromise, this Compromise of 1877 was, in some ways, a treaty. And, oh by the way, Hayes made it very clear, in private communications, what he'd been really saying publicly, and that

is that his southern policy would be essentially--his own phrase--a let-alone policy. The South would be allowed to control its own social institutions, its political culture, its lives. Even Grant himself had said that Reconstruction was dead and maybe we made mistakes and shouldn't have even tried. Grant himself said to his cabinet that the Fifteenth Amendment, he said, had, quote, "done the Negro no good." Oh Ulysses. And right after the inauguration an editorial in Nation Magazine--now a fuming, reformist magazine; they want to clean up American corruption--E.L. Godkin, its great editor at the Nation, said--he rejoiced in fact at this compromise, this settling of this dispute--and he announced, his words: "The negro," he said, "will disappear now from the field of national politics. Henceforth the nation as a nation will have nothing more to do with him."

Now there are many meanings, legacies, implications of this compromise. There are many long-lasting implications and legacies of this compromise, in this particular end of Reconstruction. And it does seem like a sort of dead end, a lights-going-out kind of moment to all that idealism, or whatever we wish to call it, that emerged from the war. It would leave a person like Frederick Douglass in a certain degree of despair. He would begin to make speeches, and he will the rest of his life, about trying to hold onto an emancipationist, abolitionist, memory of the Civil War and Reconstruction. He makes a speech a few years later where he's lamenting what has now been betrayed and lost and is eroding out of their fingers. He says Reconstruction is only--was only perhaps a rope of sand. But, he drew upon, at the end of that speech, he drew upon one of the most revolutionary moments in the Bible, to try to keep a certain degree of hope alive about what had at least been started. He went to the Lazarus story, the story of Jesus raising Lazarus literally from the dead. And Douglass said, "The assumption that the cause of the Negro is a dead issue now is delusion, utter delusion. For the moment he may be buried under the dust and rubbish of endless discussion concerning civil service reform, tariff and free trade, labor and capital, but our Lazarus is not dead, he only sleeps." See you next week.

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Civil War and Reconstruction: Lecture 27 TranscriptApril 29, 2008<< back

Professor David Blight: I'm going to talk for a few minutes about this memory question. There's an article assigned at the very end of the reading packet that you perhaps have read by now, I hope. A piece I wrote some years ago which gives you kind of a breezy take on some of the complexities of how the Civil War and Reconstruction have been remembered in the United States. It is arguably the most vexing piece of our past for our larger political, public culture to process. You can simply do it this way, though. This is one of the people that Tony Horwitz interviewed in his wonderful book Confederates in the Attic, which some of you may have read. A quite popular book; it came out about five years ago. Horwitz, a great journalist, did a travel book all over the South and tried to come to some grips and understanding of many things, but particularly of Civil War buffs and Civil War enthusiasm--of why this event endures so much in our popular culture. Among the people he interviewed was this guy who said, quote: "I think there's a lot of people like me who want to get back to a simpler time: sandlot baseball, Cowboys and Indians, and the Civil War." Just take me away. Wherever my present is, whatever my life is, just transport me, to the morning of July 3rd at Gettysburg, or some other place. There was a musician interviewed on NPR yesterday morning who's been through a horrible life of drugs and alcohol addiction. At the end of it he was asked to give the biggest influences on his recovery and his survival, and he said, "Well, certain artists, certain people, but mostly the Civil War." And that's where the interview ended. I was dying to find out what the hell did that mean? Good God Almighty. But God bless him.

All right, legacies. Everything in history has a legacy. We use the term all the time, the legacies of this; the legacies of that; the legacies of that event; what are the legacies of World War Two? What are the legacies of the Civil Rights Movement? But what is a legacy? Stop for just a second with me. Let me attempt a definition, some attempt. It can be simply another word for historical memory, of how we remember things, and then how we use them. It always carries some current, present, and often political meaning. If you use the term legacy for something, it probably has a current political stake. Reconstruction, in our history, was an ongoing referendum on the meaning and legacies of slavery in the Civil War. And so much of our racial history, our constitutional history, our political history, ever since Reconstruction, has been a referendum on the meaning and memory of Reconstruction. Was there a reconciliation in the wake of these events, of sections, of states, of soldiers, of the political class, or of masters and slaves, blacks and whites? Who got reconciled and who didn't? Legacies, I'd suggest, can be emotional. Test this with your parents or

your grandparents. Legacies can be emotional, they can be intellectual, they can be physical, they can be financial, they can be about habits, they surely can be political, and they can be sacred or secular. My parents were the Great Depression and World War Two generation and it was all over them. My father always feared insurance. He always wanted to know exact--he had no money but he always wanted to know exactly where his money was. He almost kept it under a pillow. It was stupid, it was crazy, but after the Depression and five farm foreclosures that his family had, he couldn't stand letting anyone else have his couple of thousand dollars. That's a legacy of the Great Depression. It's a habit, it's a point of view and it's a set of assumptions. This event had so many legacies that frankly we just keep adding to them with time. They just don't really go away.

Sometimes a legacy is perhaps what is simply left over, out in public memory, in our behavior, in our policies, after historians have written all their books, museums have mounted all their exhibitions, teachers have taught their classes, elders have tried to instruct the young, at the grassroots level and in families. The legacy is that which endures all of our filterings, all of our debates, all of our struggles over controlling the story we say we live in. It is where the past and the present meet. And there's no event in American history that's caused more of these struggles--there are others that compare--but there's no others that's caused more struggles over just how the past and present meet than our Civil War. Just take some of these ideas as physical legacies, emotional legacies. If you took the number of dead in the American Civil War and you moved it to the present per capita, thirteen million Americans would die in a war today. Slavery was gone, anger at its loss had no end. In the South, the economy and the physical landscape was in collapse. Two-thirds of Southern wealth of the ex-Confederate states was destroyed, in four years, and a lot of that wealth, of course, was slaves; three-and-a-half billion dollars worth. Forty percent of all Southern livestock were dead at the end of the war. Fifty percent of all farm machinery destroyed. There was an enormous refugee problem. Mobilization had occurred unmatched; it will be unmatched until World War Two. And in the South, in particular, the war had killed approximately--killed or incapacitated, excuse me--one of every four males from the age of sixteen to forty-five. How do you process that kind of loss and destruction and violence in a society that must find a way to reconcile? You can't send the defeated part somewhere else; well could've tried but Brazil wouldn't take them all, certainly Britain wouldn't take them all, Mexico couldn't--wouldn't. How would this reconciliation actually come?

I was doing research at Huntington Library a couple of years ago. I was actually there to give a lecture and I had two days to kill and I was just playing around in the Allan Nevins Papers; Allan Nevins was a great Civil War historian, back in the '50s and '60s. I grew up reading his works. And I was actually giving a lecture named for Allan

Nevins, so I thought I'd spend a couple of days in the Nevins Papers and just lose myself. There's nothing better in the world, other than teaching this class, than losing yourself in a great library for two days, with no agenda. And I'm thumbing through the Nevins Papers, it's a huge collection, and I just bump into an essay, in manuscript form, by my hero, Bruce Catton. I've mentioned him before. I grew up reading his books, Stillness at Appomattox, and so many others; the great popular historian of the Civil War in the '50s, '60s, '70s. And here was this little essay, by Catton, entitled "The End of the Centennial, 1965." Note the date, the centennial of the U.S. Civil War. Catton and Nevins had been themselves directors, executive-directors, presidents and vice-presidents, whatever they were called, of the U.S. Centennial Commission for the Civil War, a commission that was in many ways a debacle because it was all occurring--again, think of the dates--at the time of the Civil Rights Movement.

Anyway, I had just published a book on Civil War memory, this long tome, and here comes this little essay, and I was thinking, oh, Bruce Catton, I'm sure he'll agree with me. Huh. Now in this essay, which was later published I discovered--and Catton wrote it in 1965--he muses about memory, and he used the actual word memory. That was reassuring because I was writing about memory in a world of academics who were always--were very suspicious about what the hell this idea of memory was supposed to mean. He marveled in this piece at how Americans had healed--that was his word--from their Civil War, from this kind of blood-letting; how a nation over a hundred years had healed, he said. And that a nation could actually commemorate a civil war, so openly, all over the landscape, he said was truly remarkable, if not unprecedented in modern history. The war, he said, was--his word--a source of unity. "The memory of our civil war"--and I'm quoting Bruce Catton, 1965--"has not been a divisive force in this country." And I had one of those moments where I said, oh God, Bruce, say it ain't so; you didn't say that. Reminded me of the time I ran into my greatest baseball hero ever, in an airport--you probably don't even know him, Al Kaline, the right fielder for the Detroit Tigers, the one and only Al Kaline; only Roberto Clemente could even come close to Kaline as a right-fielder. I ran him into an airport once, end of his career--and I was about 28--and he was smoking a cigarette. Damn. Don't meet your heroes.

How could Bruce have written that sentence? I'd just written a 500-page book that argued exactly the opposite. For forging all this unity--I read on in the essay--for forging all this unity he gave most of the credit to Grant and Lee at Appomattox and the nature of the surrender; the compassionate character of that surrender at Appomattox. But then he went on. He said primarily he gave credit to what he called the Confederate legend, which he described as--and I'm quoting him: "a mighty, omnipresent force in the land. In all seriousness"--still quoting Catton--"the legend of the Lost Cause has been an asset to the entire country." Now that just blew me away.

Oh Bruce, please tell me you didn't write that. Catton's portrayal of the Lost Cause in this essay was that of a benign, innocent, romantic cluster of legends about the Old South, driven by the assumption, as he put it, that, quote: "no hint of enmity should ever be kept alive." His Lost Cause, in the brevity of one essay, was a story of noble sacrifice by the South, and heroism, of a nostalgia for an older civilization that had been some kind of bulwark against modernism. And in the end, as Catton put it, the Confederate legend, the Lost Cause, he said, quote, "saved us." I couldn't really take it anymore. At the very end of the essay Catton redeemed himself a bit. He acknowledged that in 1965 the war had left, he said, the unfinished business of black equality as its deepest legacy, and that, quote, "the Negro was what the war was about, somehow." Now that was probably--given how closely Catton knew Lincoln, loved Lincoln--that was probably a riff on Lincoln's use of the word 'somehow' in the Second Inaugural, where Lincoln says, "somehow, all knew the war was about slavery." And we've been trying to explain that somehow in our 65 to 70,000 books on the Civil--well some of them have--ever since. Now, I remember rising up from that thinking well I just lost another hero.

How could Bruce Catton have said all this? Well for one thing he never did any research on the Lost Cause. He didn't know the Lost Cause. He didn't know that the Lost Cause became essentially a racial ideology, that it became a cluster of legends, as he put it, but a cluster of legends in the service of white supremacy, a few assumptions in search of a history, and an ideology that came to be the buttressing, the base of Jim Crow America. But then I started thinking more and more, and I began to realize, don't be emotional about this, Bruce Catton was actually in 1965 capturing, absolutely capturing, the mainstream American conception of the Lost Cause and of Civil War memory. That the South's heroism, that the Confederacy's effort to stake all on the line for its independence, that the glorious figure of a Robert E. Lee, the steadfastness of a Jefferson Davis, had indeed become national phenomena. Catton was just summing up the mainstream of American thought by the 1960s. And that old cliché that you've heard, perhaps before many times, that the South lost the war but won the peace, or the South lost the war but won the debate over the memory, was basically what Catton was summing up. I think Catton believed this too. But I let him off the hook. Because by circa 1965 the understanding of the American Civil War in the broad mainstream culture--not among most African-Americans--and now a new young generation of historians who came of age in the wake of World War Two and were deeply interested in the problem of race in American history as never before, and deeply inspired by an anthropological, sociological, psychological revolution in the study of race, were beginning to write about it differently.

The great Southern poet, who lived much of his life, much of the second half of his life, right here, and whose papers are right there, at Beinecke, Robert Penn Warren,

wrote brilliantly about this in a little book, a little essay--actually a big essay in a little book--that he wrote in 1961 called The Legacy of the Civil War. He wrote it for Life magazine. It was later published as a book. In that book, trying to capture what the meaning of the Civil War was in American culture 100 years after, Penn Warren said that "somewhere in their bones"--and I quote him--"most Americans have a storehouse of lessons drawn from the Civil War." Now exactly what those lessons should be has been, I think, the most contested question in America's historical memory, over and over again, at least since 1865 and probably even since 1863, when the war underwent a revolution. "Among all the possible lessons of our Civil War," wrote Robert Penn Warren, "is the realization"--his words--"that slavery looms up mountainously in the story and cannot be talked away." Our culture has spent nearly now a century and a half, and it is still at it, of talking away the place of slavery in this event and its place in the aftermath. "When one is happy in forgetfulness," said Penn Warren, "facts get forgotten." Or as William Dean Howells put in 1900--and I think I quote this in the essay you've read--what the American people always like is a tragedy, as long as they can give it a happy ending. We have a tragic sensibility as a culture, as long as we can see an exit from it.

All right, let me just give you three hooks to hang your hat on, in terms of how Americans have processed this memory. I've labeled them reconciliationist, white supremacist and emancipationist, and they simply mean this. There are some other ways of thinking about how Civil War memory was processed, but most of them can come under these categories. A reconciliationist vision of this war took root in the midst of the war. It took root especially in dealing with all the dead. And Drew Faust's new book on this, called Republic of Suffering, is a must-read, if you stay interested in this subject. I'm conducting an interview with her tomorrow night in New York about that book. I've talked to so many people who keep telling me they can't read past page fifty because it's so depressing. And I usually say something stupid like, "It's good for you. Take your pill." The reconciliationist vision of this war, somehow putting ourselves back together, is rooted right there in putting bodies back together and in putting hundreds of thousands of bodies in the ground. In Faust's book, as never before, we are taken literally into those graves. She has found tremendous evidence of what soldiers themselves did on battlefields to bury their own dead, and sometimes even bury the enemy, to give people decent, human burials after they'd been half eaten by dogs. Nothing like burying a dead man without a coffin, on a battlefield that you've known, will make you pray and beg to be reconciled with something. But a second kind of Civil War memory, if we can call it that, was the white supremacist memory, which took many forms early, including, of course, the terror and violence of the Klan and its many imitators, in Reconstruction, and then locked arms eventually, in the later nineteenth century and into the twentieth century, with reconciliationists of all

kinds in our culture, and delivered the country a racially segregated memory, a racially segregated story of this experience, at least by 1900, and really even before.

A third kind of memory, always competing with these, we might call an emancipationist memory, embodied in African-Americans, complex--and they had no single memory of slavery, the war, emancipation and Reconstruction--in their own complex remembrance of what slavery and their freedom had meant to them. But an emancipationist vision of the Civil War was also rooted in the politics of Radical Reconstruction, also rooted in the three Constitutional amendments, and conceptions of the war as a re-invention of the Republic, and the liberation of blacks to citizenship--blacks and eventually others--to Constitutional equality. In the end what you have here is the story eventually of how the forces of reconciliation overwhelmed that emancipationist vision in the national culture, and how an inexorable drive for reunion of North and South, both used race and then trumped it.

But the story doesn't just dead-end in this white supremacy victory, this Lost Cause victory, because eventually the Lost Cause wasn't about causes lost at all. The Lost Cause ideology of the South became a victory narrative, and the victory, they argued, was a national victory over Reconstruction. If you want to ask what was the biggest success in the long struggle over Civil War memory, it was the success of the Lost Cause ideology in selling themselves to northerners who bought in and said, "yes, the nation has finally triumphed over the mistake of Reconstruction." But there was a fledgling neo-abolitionist tradition, that emancipationist vision of the Civil War never died a permanent death in American culture, by any means, kept alive by blacks, black leadership, and white allies. There is a persistence of that memory that, frankly folks, made possible the Civil Rights Revolution of the '50s and '60s, and it was happening even before the '50s.

But if one thing in particular happened to the memory of the Civil War, it found it its way eventually into a broad consensus, in the broader national culture--this was never unanimous of course--but in the broader national culture that somehow, in this war, in this Armageddon, in this blood-letting, everybody had been right and nobody had been wrong. You want to reconcile a country that's had a horrifying civil war, how do you do it? Well, you start building thousands upon thousands of monuments. You start having soldier reunions. You've read about the Gettysburg Reunion in this essay of mine; I won't even go into that, the biggest of all the Blue-Grey Reunions, which became the Jim Crow Reunion by 1913. And Ken Burns did not tell you that in his film, and played a very interesting trick on you with that editing button by showing you black and white veterans at the 1913 Reunion shaking hands--an irresistible, beautiful, emotional moment. The trouble is those veterans were shaking hands 25

years later, in 1938, at the New Deal Reunion at Gettysburg. They weren't there in 1913, but in the film that's certainly what it looks like. The power of filmmaking.

There was a popular novel published in 1912--there were a zillion popular novels published about the Civil War. But this one was by a Southern woman writer, a very interesting writer we don't read much today, if anybody reads her, although she was important in her time. Her name was Mary Johnston. She was a Virginian, born to the upper crust of Virginia planter life, born just after the war. She was imbued with the Lost Cause tradition, but grew up wanting to interrogate it a little bit. She was a Lost Causer but she asked questions about it. She became a suffragist. A progressive woman in so many ways. She wrote a trilogy of Civil War books. Her most famous book, and it was a huge bestseller, was called To Have and to Hold. But one of her trilogy is a novel calledCease Firing, which also was a near bestseller. And in Cease Firing, on the last page of the book, she has Lee's Army retreating from Richmond, out toward their surrender at Appomattox. And she's a good writer. And literally, on the last two pages, she has two Confederate soldiers, in their rags, half- starved, in conversation. And one of these old veterans asks the other what he thinks it all means--"what's it all about brother?" And the other answers and says, "I think that we were both right, and both wrong, and that in the beginning each side might've been more patient and much wiser. Life and history, and right and wrong, in the minds of men, look out of more windows than we used to think. Did you never hear of the shield that had two sides and both were made of precious metal?" Why didn't we just get along? We were both right. Now, that's an honest sentiment she puts in the mouths of a half-starved Confederate veteran who's lucky to be alive and is now either about to desert or surrender to the Union Army, neither option of which he ever hoped to live to have to face. And she also captures in that moment a very honest sentiment that had set in all over American culture, especially in veterans' culture, at all those Blue-Grey Reunions--and the Gettysburg Blue-Grey Reunion was about to occur the following year after this book was published--and that is this sense of the mutuality of sacrifice among soldiers. Cure the hatreds of war by bringing the warriors together, because they have a mutuality of experience. And there was, of course, no lack of honor at Appomattox, on either side.

But outside of all that pathos, that understanding, that sentiment that Americans had bought into by the millions, there was, of course, another whole story going on, out in American culture and in national memory. In 1912, the NAACP counted seventy-two lynchings, in America; about ninety percent of whom were African-Americans. By 1912, when that book was published, the entire Jim Crow legal system and all of its absurdities was fully in place, roughly by about 1910, across the South and in some of the border states, and to some extent even in the North. An erasure of cultural, historical, mnemonic erasure, had been going on for three, four and five decades, of

emancipation, from the national narrative of what this war had even ever been about. That process led the great black scholar, W.E.B. Du Bois--same year, 1912--in the Crisis magazine, the journal of NAACP, to conclude, as he put it, "This country has had its appetite for facts on the Civil War and the Negro problem spoiled by sweets." They'd eaten too much candy.

Let me give you one other example, from one of these other Blue-Grey Reunions. By the 1890s--these weren't easy to do, these Blue-Grey Reunions, bringing back Confederate and Union veterans to old battlefields or sites and cities and so forth, these weren't easy to do. They first attempted doing it in the 1870s. Confederates didn't want to come to these things. 1880s even it wasn't easy to do. They had one at Gettysburg on the twentieth anniversary and on the twenty-fifth anniversary, but it was hard especially to get Confederates to go to Gettysburg, the scene of their worst defeat. But by the 1890s, twenty-five years out now, and thirty years out, from the war, with the transmission--and we know this about so many events and the way generations learned from one another and the way memory gets passed on--as soon as there is truly a generational transition, the old veterans, as they get older, are willing to come. The 1900 Blue-Grey Reunion was held in Atlanta. And by the way, Southern cities started to compete for these things just like Northern cites, because they were huge moneymakers. Thousands and thousands of veterans would come with their families and spend thousands and thousands of dollars. Anyway, in 1900 the Blue-Grey was in Atlanta, and during the major speeches at that reunion the Commander of the GAR, the Grand Army of the Republic, the big Northern veterans' organization, was a guy named Shaw from Massachusetts; no relation to Robert Gould Shaw of the famous 54th Mass. And in his speech he lectured the Confederate veterans--this guy had a lot of New England chutzpah--he lectured them about their efforts to control school textbooks; which by the way all veterans' organizations were absolutely doing. Every Confederate veterans' organization had its textbook committee, and many Union veterans' posts and organizations had their textbook committee. They were competing with one another to control the story in America's textbooks and trying to lobby and control publishers. Anyway, Commander Shaw was a little exercised about this, and he said, among other things, quote--and you can almost see a sort of schoolmarmish finger-wagging in what he says. He said, quote, "Keeping alive sectional teachings as to the justice and rights of the cause of the South, in the hearts of your children, is all out of order. It is unwise and unjust." Uh huh.

The Commander of the United Confederate Veterans was none other than John B. Gordon. John B. Gordon had been a Confederate General. John B. Gordon was the Confederate General in charge of the stacking of the arms and the surrender at Appomattox. John B. Gordon then went on to get elected Governor and then Senator from Georgia during Reconstruction. He was also one of the founders of the Ku Klux

Klan in Georgia, although he lied through his teeth in the KKK Hearings of 1871 about it. But John B. Gordon, by the 1890s, became one of the most ubiquitous and popular Confederate Memorial Day speakers. And he was good at it. He got up to respond to Commander Shaw--and this is a final passage in what he said. John B. Gordon, 1900, head of the UCV, United Confederate Veterans. "When he tells me and my Southern comrades that teaching our children that the cause for which we fought and our comrades died is all wrong, I must earnestly protest. In the name of the future manhood of the South I protest. What are we to teach them? If we cannot teach them that their fathers were right, it follows that these Southern children must be taught that they were wrong. I never will be ready to have my children taught that I was ever wrong, or that the cause of my people was unjust and unholy. Oh my friends, you were right, but we were right too."

Everybody was right, nobody was wrong, in a war that killed 620,000 people and maimed about 1.2 million, and transformed the society. But no one was wrong. In fact, by the 1890s, as it is still today, it became very popular to be a Confederate veteran. If you've read Tony Horwitz's Confederates in the Attic, he showed how so many Civil War re-enactors, it appears still today, prefer to re-enact Confederates than to re-enact Unionist, although there are lots of Union re-enactors; and there are now lots of black re-enactors. Which raises a fascinating intellectual question, which we don't have to dwell on now, and that is why is defeat sometimes more interesting than victory? Ask yourselves that. Why do those Nazis never disappear from the bookstore shelves, often right up front? Nazis, dogs, and the Civil War, as the publishers sometimes tell you, if you write about those we'll buy it, we'll sell it. Hate being in that category. And then there are those who will say things like Nazis' Holocaust memoirs, dogs, and the Civil War--horses too, big deal, the horses.

Anyway, the Confederate Veteran magazine, which became a very popular magazine in the 1890s and lasted like thirty-five years into the twentieth century, ran this little story in 1894. It reported a story of a Southern woman, a white woman, and her son, attending a production, a theater production in Brooklyn, New York, of the play called Held by the Enemy. And theater productions, plays, about the Civil War, especially with some kind of reconciliationist theme, became wildly popular by the 1890s. The boy, sitting there with his mother, according to the anonymous author, asked his mother, "What did the Yankees fight for, Mother?" And as the orchestra strikes up "Marching Through Georgia," the woman answers, "For the Union, darling." Painful memories, we're told, bring sadness to the mother's face as she hears the Yankee victory song. And then earnestly the boy asks, "What did the Confederates fight for, Mother?" And before the mother can answer, the music changes to "Home Sweet Home," which fills the theater, says the author, with its depth of untold melody and pathos. The mother whispers her answer to her son. "Do you hear what they are

playing? That is what Confederates fought for darling." And the boy counters, "Did they fight for their homes?" And with the parent's assurance, the boy bursts into tears, and with what the author calls "the intuition of right," he hugs his mother and announces, "Oh Mother, I will be a Confederate." They just fought for their homes, that's all you needed to know. Now it may be all a mother would want her little boy to know.

But all over American culture there were millions who didn't really want to know any more. Everybody was right, nobody was wrong. There are a hundred ways to plant this story, or examples through which to tell this story, and I don't want to take really any more time on it. You can read a book called Race and Reunion, if it ever so moves you. I want to get to our review; yes I am getting to our review. But I do want to leave you with this thought; two images, if I can; three images actually. Or two metaphors; one I guess isn't quite a metaphor. In the second chapter of Du Bois' The Souls of Black Folk--okay, I'm going to test you, how many of you have read The Souls of Black Folk? Oh, we got work to do at Yale. No one should have a degree from Yale without reading The Souls of Black Folk. No one should have U.S. citizenship without reading The Souls of Black Folk. But since I don't rule the world, who cares? Chapter 2 of Du Bois' masterpiece is an essay he called "The Dawn of Freedom." It starts out ostensibly as an essay on, kind of a little history of The Freedmen's Bureau and a little take on Reconstruction, but he turns it into much, more. He turns it into a meditation--not unlike Penn Warren will do in 1961--but a mediation on the meaning and memory of slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction. And he goes into a discussion, as only Du Bois could, because Du Bois was really a poet-historian or a historian as poet. He begins to discuss how bleak life actually is on the ground, in the South, not just for the freedmen as sharecroppers, but for whites as well; that poverty is a black and white thing, he says. He's got another chapter to come in the book called "The Black Belt," where he shows that, that poverty is something Southerners share, if they would.

And then he stops and he says, in effect, see this picture with me through what he calls two figures. He says they're two figures, in his view, that typify the post-war era and the power of its legacy. Here's the passage. "Two figures," says Du Bois, quote, "the one a grey-haired gentleman whose fathers had quit themselves like men, whose sons lay in nameless graves, who bowed to the evil of slavery because its abolition threatened untold ill to all; who stood at last, in the evening of life, a ruined form, with hate in his eyes." Your first figure is an old white man, probably a former planter, who's lost everything. He's bitter, he's really bitter. He feels a burden of Southern history. And then Du Bois says, "And the other, a form hovering dark and mother-like, her awful face black with the mists of centuries, had aforetime quailed at that white master's command, had bent in love over the cradles of his sons and daughters,

and closed in death the sunken eyes of his wife; and ay too, at his behest, had laid herself low to his lust and borne a tawny man child to the world, only to see her dark boy's limbs scattered to the winds by midnight marauders riding after 'Damned Niggers.'" The second image, an old black woman, former slave, mammy, but also broken, no future, doesn't even know where that son might be, and the son is probably dead. But Du Bois presses the issue. Du Bois had a genuine sense of tragedy and he didn't care sometimes whether he gave you a happy ending. He pressed the issue. He says then, "These were the saddest sights"--I'm quoting--"of that woeful day, and no man clasped the hands of these passing figures of the present-past"--legacy, where past and present meet. "No man clasped the hands of these passing figures of the present-past; but hating they went to their long home, and hating their children's children live today."

Now, unmistakably, Du Bois is using that language of clasping hands for a purpose, because it's by far the most ubiquitous image used in all the Blue-Grey Reunions, by the '90s. He first wrote this essay in 1897 and revised the Souls of Black Folk in 1903. But the most ubiquitous image in all the Blue-Grey reunions was--in fact the slogan was--clasping hands across the bloody chasm. And the shaking of hands, of the Blue and the Grey, the old Confederate vets, the old Union vets, was always the photo op; and it's all over the ending of Burns' film. And how can you resist it? In some ways, what can be more beautiful than old, old men, chests full of medals, shaking hands across the walls they tried to kill each other over? There's something human about that, that we can't quite resist. But Du Bois says, you know what? There are two other kinds of veterans of the Civil War, and no one's ever clasped their hand.

And now I will just ask you to think--I'm not doing this for any political partisan reason--I don't know if you've read it but at the very end of Barack Obama's race speech. I'm talking about Obama now as a historian, not as a candidate. He's got enough problems with... [Laughter] Reverend Wright right now. But this is Obama the writer. And I don't know if he read Chapter 2 of Souls before he wrote that speech, in Philadelphia a month ago; it doesn't really matter if he did. And I don't remember, if you read to the end of it, if you've read it, or if you heard it--I've actually never heard it, I've only read it. But the way he ends that speech is the way a lot of politicians get up on the stump and talk. And at first you're ready to dismiss it, it's another one of those stories of "well, you know, I met somebody on the campaign trail and here's what she said to me, and she had this terrible story to tell; let me tell you her terrible story." And you start tuning out like "oh God, here comes another story of Old Aunt Something-or-other on welfare or whatever." But no, it's the story of a young twenty-three year old white woman named Ashley Baia, who is his campaign manager in Florence, South Carolina. And he remembered the story of when he, during the South Carolina primary, he was doing an event in Florence, South Carolina, and he meets

Ashley and Ashley tells him her story. And that story is, in brief, that she grew up with a single mother, poor, a poor white girl in the South. At age about ten her mother got cancer, lost her job. The family went bankrupt, etcetera, etcetera. In order to help out her mother--she told the story of eating nothing but mustard and relish sandwiches for a year or a year and half. Apparently her mother survived but they never really--survived with a bankruptcy. But somehow as she got older she got interested in politics. Now that's a white, lower working-class, poor, southern girl who had every right to be in that group Obama had described earlier, who are the whites in America with a lot of resentment of all the racial changes in America. Instead she becomes his campaign manager, and she put together this whole gathering in Florence, in some, I don't know, church hall or wherever they were meeting; mostly black folk.

And then Obama describes how everybody in the room had to go around and say why they were there, or what issue they were there for. And he says, with quite some directness, that most people did what most people do, they name a single issue; it's about them, it's about us, right? It's not about the common good, it's about us. I want a better job, I want healthcare, I want this, I want that, I want, I want, I want. Okay, fair enough. And they finally come around to an old back man who's sitting there, kind of at the end of the aisle, and he's asked, "So why are you here?" Obama doesn't even name him. He says, "I'm just here because Ashley brought me here. I'm only here because of Ashley." Now Obama says--in effect, he develops at the end of the speech a refrain about not this time, he says; not this time, we're not going to let race divide us this time. Like Du Bois' two figures, hating, till their death; and hating, their children's children live today. Well, here are two children. But note what he's reversed. We got a young white woman who should've been in the resentful white working-class, and an old black man who no doubt grew up in Jim Crow and probably has told story after story of the denigration or destruction of his dignity for the first 45 years of his life. But he's there because of Ashley. Thank you.

[end of transcript]

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