CHAPTER III
THE RESTORATION OF HOME RULE IN THE SOUTH
The eight Southern States whose votes were cast in 1868 were far different from the States of the same names in 1860, and were, like the three still outside the Union, largely under the control of radical Republicans. Restoration, after a fashion, they had received, but it had been accompanied by a revolution in society, in politics, and in economic life. "Reconstruction" is an inappropriate name for what took place.
Many efforts have been made to show the price paid by the South for its attempt at independence, but these have always failed to be exact. No scheme of accounting can uncover all the costs. It is a sufficient suggestion as to the total that a million men, at the prime of life, were diverted from ordinary production for about three years. Not only did the South lose the products of their labor, but it lost many of them, while its houses, barns, and other permanent improvements wore out, were burned, or went to pieces from lack of care. Its slave property was destroyed. Poverty was universal within the region of the Confederacy when Johnson issued his amnesty proclamation and the troops came home.
The most immediate problems before the Southern planter in the spring of 1865 were his dilapidated buildings, his spring crops, and his labor supply. Without money or credit, he needed all the stiffness of a proud caste to hold off bankruptcy. The daughter of a prominent Mississippi planter told later how her father, at seventy years, did the family washing to keep his daughters from the tub. A society whose men and women took this view of housework (for the daughters let their father have his way) had much to learn before it could reëstablish itself. Yet this same stubbornness carried the South through the twenty trying years after the war.
The system of slave labor was gone, but the negroes were still the chief reliance for labor. It appears from the scanty records that are available that the planters expected to reopen the plantations using the freedmen as hired laborers. In 1865 and 1866 they tried this, only to find that the negro had got beyond control and would not work. Supervision had become hateful to him. A vagrant life appealed to his desire for change. At best, he was unintelligent and indolent. In a few years it became clear that the old type of plantation had vanished, and that the substitute was far from satisfactory.
Failing at hiring the negro for wages, the planter tried to rent to him a part of the estate. But since the tenant was penniless the landlord had to find much or all of the tools and stock, and too often had to see the crops deserted while the negro went riding around the county on his mule, full of his new independence. The census records show the decline of the plantation as the labor system changed. In 1860 the average American farm contained 199 acres, while those of the eleven seceding States ranged in average from 245 in Arkansas, to 430 in Georgia, and 591 in Texas. All were far above the national average, for the economics of the plantation system impelled the owner ever to increase his holdings. In 1870, and again in 1880, the reports show a rapid decline. The average for the whole country went down from 199 to 134 acres in the twenty years, as intensive agriculture advanced, but the South declined more rapidly than the whole, and in 1880, in all but two States, the average farm was less than half its size before the Civil War.
The vagrant, shiftless freedman was a social problem as well as economic. To fix his new status was the effort of the legislatures that convened in 1865, under the control of those who had qualified as loyal in Johnson's scheme. In several States laws were passed relating to contracts, apprenticeship, and vagrancy, under which the negro was to be held to regular work and the employer was given the right to punish him. The laws represented the opinion of the white citizens that special provisions were needed to control and regulate the negro population now that the personal bond of the owner for the good behavior of his slaves was canceled. To the North, still excited and nervous in 1865, the laws appeared to embody an overt attempt to restore the essentials of slavery. They served to embitter Congress toward Johnson's plans, and to convince Republicans that the professed loyalty of former Confederates was hypocritical,—that these must not be permitted to return at once to federal office or to Congress.
It was not until the summer of 1867 that Congress substituted governments of its own design for those which Johnson had erected by proclamation. These, meanwhile, had proceeded to revise their constitutions and to adopt the Thirteenth Amendment, which was proclaimed as part of the Constitution in December, 1865. The direct hand of Congress was shown in the strengthening of the Freedmen's Bureau in the spring of 1866, and the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment in the following summer.