Bricks Without Straw: A Novel

by Albion Winegar Tourgée

It was in this state of mind that he had watched the new phase of the "irrepressible conflict" which supervened upon the downfall of the Rebellion In so doing, he had arrived at the following conclusions:

1. That it was a most fortunate and providential thing that the Confederacy had failed. He had begun to realize the wisdom of Washington when he referred to the dogma of "State rights" as "that bantling—I like to have said that monster."

2. That the emancipation of the slaves would ultimately prove advantageous to the white man,

3. That it was the part of honorable men fairly and honestly to carry out and give effect to all the conditions, expressed and implied, on which power, representation, and autonomy were restored to the recently rebellious States. This he believed to be a personal duty, and a failure so to do he regarded as a disgrace to every man in any way contributing to it, especially if he had been a soldier and had shared the defeat of which these conditions were a consequence.

4. He did not regard either the war or the legislation known as reconstructionary as having in any manner affected the natural relation of the races. In the old times he had never felt or believed that the slave was inherently endowed with the same rights as the master; and he did not see how the results of war could enhance his natural rights. He did not believe that the colored man had an inherent right to freedom or to self-government. Whatever right of that kind he might now have was simply by the free grace of the conqueror. He had a right to the fruit of his own labor, to the care, protection, and service of his own children, to the society and comfort of his wife, to the protection of his own person, to marriage, the ballot, possessory capacity, and all those things which distinguish the citizen from the chattel—not because of his manhood, nor because of inherent co-equality of right with the white man; but simply because the national legislation gave it to him as a condition precedent of statal rehabilitation.

These may seem to the Northern reader very narrow views; and so they are, as compared with those that underlay the spirit of resistance to rebellion, and the fever heat for human rights, which was the animating principle in the hearts of the people when they endorsed and approved those amendments which were the basis of reconstructionary legislation. It should be remembered, however, that even these views were infinitely in advance of the ideas generally entertained by his white fellow-citizens of the South. Nearly all of them regarded these matters in a very different light; and most naturally, too, as any one may understand who will lemember what had gone before, and will keep in mind that defeat does not mean a new birth, and that warfare leaves men unchanged by its results, whatever may be its effects on nations and societies.

They regretted the downfall of the Confederacy as the triumph of a lower and baser civilization—the ascendency of a false idea and an act of unrighteous and unjustifiable subversion. To their minds it was a forcible denial of their rights, and, to a large portion of them, a dishonorable violation of that contract or treaty upon which the Federal Union was based, and by which the right for which they fought had, according to their construction, been assured. As viewed by them, the result of the war had not changed these facts, nor justified the infraction of the rights of the South.

In the popular phrase of that day, they "accepted the situation"—which to their minds, simply meant that they would not fight any more for independent existence. The North understood it to mean that they would accept cheerfully and in good faith any terms and conditions which might be imposed upon them as a condition of rehabilitation.

The masses of the Southern whites regarded the emancipation of the negro simply as an arbitrary exercise of power, intended as a punishment for the act of attempted secession—which act, while many believed it to have been impolitic, few believed to be in conflict with the true theory of our government. They considered the freeing of the slave merely a piece of wanton spite, inspired, in great measure, by sheer envy of Southern superiority, in part by angry hate because of the troubles, perils, and losses of the war, and, in a very small degree, by honest though absurd fanaticism. They did not believe that it was done for the sake of the slave, to secure his liberty or to establish his rights; but they believed most devoutly that it was done solely and purposely to injure the master, to punish the rebel, and to still further cripple and impoverish the South. It was, to them, an unwarrantable measure of unrighteous retribution inspired by the lowest and basest motives.

But if, to the mass of Southern white men, emancipation was a measure born of malicious spite in the breast of the North, what should they say of that which followed—the enfranchisement of the black? It was a gratuitous insult—a causeless infamy! It was intended to humiliate, without even the mean motive of advantage to be derived. They did not for a moment believe—they do not believe to-day—that the negro was enfranchised for his own sake, or because the North believed that he was entitled to self-government, or was fit for self-government; but simply and solely because it was hoped thereby to degrade, overawe, and render powerless the white element of the Southern populations. They thought it a fraud in itself, by which the North pretended to give back to the South her place in the nation; but instead, gave her only a debased and degraded co-ordination with a race despised beyond the power of words to express.