The New Nation

by Frederic L. Paxson

The Freedmen's Bureau had its excuse in the poverty and ignorance of the negroes who crowded about the invading armies. Toward the end of the war it was authorized to administer abandoned property, and to aid the freedmen in farming upon the same. It did wide charitable and educational work in easing the abrupt change from slavery to freedom, and would have been dissolved a year after the return of peace had not Congress maintained it to offset the tendencies of Johnson's administration. Hereafter the agents of the Bureau were thrown into politics until 1872.

The permanent government of the conquered South by the army was repugnant to even radical Northerners, yet the white inhabitants were Democratic almost to the last man, and if restored to civil rights would control their States. The only means of developing a Southern Republican party that might keep the South "loyal" was the enfranchisement of the freedman, for which purpose the Fourteenth Amendment was submitted. The agents of the Bureau were expected not only to feed and clothe the negroes, but to impress upon them the fact that they owed their freedom to the Republicans. Some spread the belief that the Democrats desired to restore slavery. Many built up personal machines. The responsibility upon these white directors of the negro vote was great, and was too often betrayed. Generally not natives, and with no stake in the Southern community, they lined their own pockets and earned the unkindly name of "carpet-baggers." The Territories had always known something of this type of ruler, but the States, hitherto, had known bad government only when they made it themselves.

The Reconstruction Acts of 1867 ordered the President to divide the South into five military districts, whose commanders should supersede all the state officers whom Johnson had restored. With troops behind them, these commanders were, first, to enroll on the voting list all males over twenty-one. The negroes, before the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, were thus given by Congress the right to vote in their respective States, and were included in the lists. Excluded from the lists were the leaders of every Southern community, those whites who had held important office in the Confederacy; and none was to be enrolled, white or black, until he had taken an ironclad and offensive oath of allegiance.

Based upon the list of voters thus made up, state conventions were to be summoned to revise the constitutions. In every case they must modify the laws to admit the status of the freedmen, must ratify the Fourteenth Amendment with its guaranty of civil rights, and must extend the right of suffrage to the blacks. When all these things had been done, with army officers constantly in supervision, the resulting constitutions were to be submitted to Congress for final approval or rejection.

No constitutional theory ever met all the problems of reconstruction. The war had been fought on the basis that no State can get out of the Union. If this was true, then all the States were still States, and it was a reasonable presidential function to restore order and withdraw the troops. The unreasonable result of this theory was the immediate restoration of an enlarged influence to those very men who had tried to break the Union, at a moment when the greenback movement threatened the foundations of public faith. Yet Congress, by pretending to readmit or restore States, denied that they were still States, and by implication conceded the principle for which the Confederacy had contended: that the members of the Union could get outside it. The power of Congress to seat or unseat members, however, placed it beyond all control. Every effort to get the courts to interfere broke down, when the suits were directed against the President (Mississippi vs. Andrew Johnson), or the Secretary of War (Georgia vs. Stanton). A personal suit that promised some relief (Ex parte McCardle) was evaded by a sudden amendment of the law relating to appeals. The situation was unpremeditated, and the Constitution made no provision for its facts. In the end, reconstruction must be judged by its results rather than by its legality. If it brought peace, restored prosperity, safeguarded the Union, and created no new grievances of its own, it was good, whatever the Constitution.

Johnson enforced the Reconstruction Acts with care, and the Southern conventions, meeting in the autumn of 1867, sat into the following winter. In five of the States the roll of electors showed a majority of negroes, and in none were conservatives able to control the election of delegates. The old leaders were still disfranchised, and many of them could not believe that the North would permit the radicals to subject them to the control of illiterate negroes. The resulting conventions contained many negroes and were dominated by white Republicans, carpet-baggers, or scalawags as the case might be. An active part in directing them was taken by the officers of the Freedmen's Bureau, while the freedmen were consolidated by the secret ritual of the Union League. Only Tennessee escaped the ordeal, she having ratified the Fourteenth Amendment so promptly that Congress could not evade admitting her in 1866.

An analysis of the conventions of 1867 reveals the extent of the political revolution which Congress intended to thrust upon the South, whose industrial revolution was now well advanced. Planters had begun already to break up their estates and entrust small holdings to cash renters, or share tenants, known as "croppers." Their financial burdens were heavy, but with intelligent government and reasonable commercial credits from the North, the problems of labor and capital might be met. But the men who must control the economic future of the South were excluded from the Government as traitors. Their places were filled by Northern adventurers and by negroes. The Mississippi convention included seventeen negroes, and was called the "black and tan." Inexperience and incompetence were in control, leading to extravagance and dishonesty, but the conventions were generally superior to the legislatures which followed them.

Framing new constitutions, most of the States had met the demands of Congress by the summer of 1868, with the respectable portion of the South looking on in desperate silence. The war had left no grievances equal to those now being suffered. Seven of the new constitutions were adopted in time for the radicals to give to their States votes in the election of 1868. Alabama, making the eighth, was allowed to vote under a constitution which Congress had forced upon her after it had failed of ratification by the people. Only Georgia and Louisiana, of these eight, did not give their votes to Grant. Only Virginia, Mississippi, and Texas remained without the pale when Grant was inaugurated in 1869.

The completion of reconstruction in its formal sense was reached during Grant's first Congress. Mississippi completed her process in February, 1870. She had in 1868 voted down the reconstruction constitution, taking courage in the leadership of a conservative governor, Humphreys. When he was removed, and replaced by a Northern governor, the conservatives lost heart and ratified the constitution that they had rejected. Their delay cost the State one more humiliation, since in the interval the Fifteenth Amendment had been submitted by Congress and made a condition of readmission for the recalcitrant States. A Republican legislature, the first fruit of reconstruction, accepted this and sent to Washington as the new Mississippi Senators the Northern military governor, Ames, and a negro preacher named Revels.

Virginia was readmitted in January, 1870. Her original loyal government under Pierpont, which Lincoln had respected, had been supplanted by a military régime, having lost its last chance for recognition when it rejected the Fourteenth Amendment in 1867. Under congressional direction a negro-radical convention made a new constitution which was forced upon the people in January, 1870. Texas, too, was in her final stage of restoration in 1870, and like Virginia and Mississippi was readmitted upon conditions that had become more onerous since the passage of the Reconstruction Acts in 1867.