VII.—CIVIL WAR AND RECONSTRUCTION.
THE transformation of the original secession movement into a de facto nationality made war inevitable, but acts of war had already taken place, with or without State authority. Seizures of forts, arsenals, mints, custom-houses, and navy yards, and captures of Federal troops, had completely extinguished the authority of the United States in the secession area, except at Fort Sumter in South Carolina, and Fort Pickens and the forts at Key West in Florida; and active operations to reduce these had been begun. When an attempt was made, late in January, 1861, to provision Fort Sumter, the provision steamer, Star of the West, was fired on by the South Carolina batteries and driven back. Nevertheless, the Buchanan administration succeeded in keeping the peace until its constitutional expiration in March, 1861, although the rival and irreconcilable administration at Montgomery was busily engaged in securing its exclusive authority in the seceding States.
Neither of the two incompatible administrations was anxious to strike the first blow. Mr. Lincoln's administration began with the policy outlined in his inaugural address, that of insisting on collection of the duties on imports, and avoiding all other irritating measures. Mr. Seward, Secretary of State, even talked of compensating for the loss of the seceding States by admissions from Canada and elsewhere. The urgent needs of Fort Sumter, however, soon forced an attempt to provision it; and this brought on a general attack upon it by the Confederate batteries around it. After a bombardment of two days, and a vigorous defence by the fort, in which no one was killed on either side, the fort surrendered, April 14, 1861. It was now impossible for the United States to ignore the Confederate States any longer. President Lincoln issued a call for volunteers, and a proclamation announcing a blockade of the coast of the seceding States. A similar call on the other side and the issue of letters of marque and reprisal against the commerce of the United States were followed by an act of the Confederate Congress formally recognizing the existence of war with the United States. The two powers were thus locked in a struggle for life or death, the Confederate States fighting for existence and recognition, the United States for the maintenance of recognized boundaries and jurisdiction; the Confederate States claiming to be at war with a foreign power, the United States to be engaged in the suppression of individual resistance to the laws. The event was to decide between the opposing claims; and it was certain that the event must be the absolute extinction of either the Confederate States or the United States within the area of secession.
President Lincoln called Congress together in special session, July 4, 1861; and Congress at once undertook to limit the scope of the war in regard to two most important points, slavery and State rights. Resolutions passed both Houses, by overwhelming majorities, that slavery in the seceding States was not to be interfered with, that the autonomy of the States themselves was to be strictly maintained, and that, when the Union was made secure, the war ought to cease. If the war had ended in that month, these resolutions would have been of some value; every month of the extension of the war made them of less value. They were repeatedly offered afterward from the Democratic side, but were as regularly laid on the table. Their theory, however, continued to control the Democratic policy to the end of the war.
For a time the original policy was to all appearance unaltered. The war was against individuals only; and peace was to be made with individuals only, the States remaining untouched, but the Confederate States being blotted out in the process. The only requisite to recognition of a seceding State was to be the discovery of enough loyal or pardoned citizens to set its machinery going again. Thus the delegates from the forty western counties of Virginia were recognized as competent to give the assent of Virginia to the erection of the new State of West Virginia; and the Senators and Representatives of the new State actually sat in judgment on the reconstruction of the parent State, although the legality of the parent government was the evident measure of the constitutional existence of the new State. Such inconsistencies were the natural results of the changes forced upon the Federal policy by the events of the war, as it grew wider and more desperate.
The first of these changes was the inevitable attack upon slavery. The labor system of the seceding States was a mark so tempting that no belligerent should have been seriously expected to have refrained from aiming at it. January 1, 1863, after one hundred days' notice, President Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation, freeing the slaves within the enemy's lines as rapidly as the Federal arms should advance. This one break in the original policy involved, as possible consequences, all the ultimate steps of reconstruction. Read-mission was no longer to be a simple restoration; abolition of slavery was to be a condition-precedent which the government could never abandon. If the President could impose such a condition, who was to put bounds to the power of Congress to impose limitations on its part? The President had practically declared, contrary to the original policy, that the war should continue until slavery was abolished; what was to hinder Congress from declaring that the war should continue until, in its judgment, the last remnants of the Confederate States were satisfactorily blotted out? This, in effect, was the basis of reconstruction, as finally carried out. The steady opposition of the Democrats only made the final terms the harder.
The principle urged consistently from the beginning of the war by Thaddeus Stevens, of Pennsylvania, was that serious resistance to the Constitution implied the suspension of the Constitution in the area of resistance. No one, he insisted, could truthfully assert that the Constitution of the United States was then in force in South Carolina; why should Congress be bound by the Constitution in matters connected with South Carolina? If the resistance should be successful, the suspension of the Constitution would evidently be perpetual; Congress alone could decide when the resistance had so far ceased that the operations of the Constitution could be resumed. The terms of readmission were thus to be laid down by Congress. To much the same effect was the different theory of Charles Sumner, of Massachusetts. While he held that the seceding States could not remove themselves from the national jurisdiction, except by successful war, he maintained that no Territory was obliged to become a State, and that no State was obliged to remain a State; that the seceding States had repudiated their State-hood, had committed suicide as States, and had become Territories; and that the powers of Congress to impose conditions on their readmission were as absolute as in the case of other Territories. Neither of these theories was finally followed out in reconstruction, but both had a strong influence on the final process.
President Lincoln followed the plan subsequently completed by Johnson. The original (Pierpont) government of Virginia was recognized and supported. Similar governments were established in Tennessee, Louisiana, and Arkansas, and an unsuccessful attempt was made to do so in Florida. The amnesty proclamation of December, 1863, offered to recognize any State government in the seceding States formed by one tenth of the former voters who should take the oath of loyalty and support of the emancipation measures. At the following session of Congress, the first bill providing for congressional supervision of the readmission of the seceding States was passed, but the President retained it without signing it until Congress had adjourned. At the time of President Lincoln's assassination Congress was not in session, and President Johnson had six months in which to complete the work. Provisional governors were appointed, conventions were called, the State constitutions were amended by the abolition of slavery and the repudiation of the war debt, and the ordinances of secession were either voided or repealed. When Congress met in December, 1865, the work had been completed, the new State governments were in operation, and the XIIIth Amendment, abolishing slavery, had been ratified by aid of their votes. Congress, however, still refused to admit their Senators or Representatives. The first action of many of the new governments had been to pass labor, contract, stay, and vagrant laws which looked much like a re-establishment of slavery, and the majority in Congress felt that further guarantees for the security of the freedmen were necessary before the war could be truly said to be over.
Early in 1866 President Johnson imprudently carried matters into an open quarrel with Congress, which united the two thirds Republican majority in both Houses against him. The elections of the autumn of 1866 showed that the two thirds majorities were to be continued through the next Congress; and in March, 1867, the first Reconstruction Act was passed over the veto. It declared the existing governments in the seceding States to be provisional only; put the States under military governors until State conventions, elected with negro suffrage and excluding the classes named in the proposed XIVth Amendment, should form a State government satisfactory to Congress, and the State government should ratify the XIVth Amendment; and made this rule of suffrage imperative in all elections under the provisional governments until they should be readmitted. This was a semi-voluntary reconstruction. In the same month the new Congress, which met immediately on the adjournment of its predecessor, passed a supplementary act. It directed the military governors to call the conventions before September 1st following, and thus enforced an involuntary reconstruction.
Tennessee had been readmitted in 1866. North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, and Arkansas were reconstructed under the acts, and were readmitted in 1868. Georgia was also readmitted, but was remanded again for expelling negro members of her Legislature, and came in under the secondary terms. Virginia, Georgia, Mississippi, and Texas, which had refused or broken the first terms, were admitted in 1870, on the additional terms of ratifying the XVth Amendment, which forbade the exclusion of the negroes from the elective franchise.
In Georgia the white voters held control of their State from the beginning. In the other seceding States the government passed, at various times and by various methods during the next six years after 1871, under control of the whites, who still retain control. One of the avowed objects of reconstruction has thus failed; but, to one who does not presume that all things will be accomplished at a single leap, the scheme, in spite of its manifest blunders and crudities, must seem to have had a remarkable success. Whatever the political status of the negro may now be in the seceding States, it may be confidently affirmed that it is far better than it would have been in the same time under an unrestricted readmission. The whites, all whose energies have been strained to secure control of their States, have been glad, in return for this success to yield a measure of other civil rights to the freedmen, which is already fuller than ought to have been hoped for in 1867. And, as the general elective franchise is firmly imbedded in the organic law, its ultimate concession will come more easily and gently than if it were then an entirely new step.
During this long period of almost continuous exertion of national power there were many subsidiary measures, such as the laws authorizing the appointment of supervisors for congressional elections, and the use of Federal troops as a posse comitatus by Federal supervisors, which were not at all in line with the earlier theory of the division between Federal and State powers. The Democratic party gradually abandoned its opposition to reconstruction, accepting it as a disagreeable but accomplished fact, but kept up and increased its opposition to the subsidiary measures. About 1876-7 a reaction became evident, and with President Hayes' withdrawal of troops from South Carolina, Federal control of affairs in the Southern States came to an end.
Foreign affairs are not strictly a part of our subject; but, as going to show one of the dangerous features of the Civil War, the possibility of the success of the secession sentiment in England in obtaining the intervention of that country, the speech of Mr. Beecher in Liver-pool, with the addenda of his audience, has been given.
